An Arctic study is helping to unravel an important mystery surrounding climate change: how quickly glaciers can melt and grow in response to shifts in temperature. According to the research, glaciers on Canada's Baffin Island expanded rapidly during a brief cold snap about 8,200 years ago. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence showing that ice sheets reacted rapidly in the past to cooling or warming, raising concerns that they could do so again as the Earth heats up.
University at Buffalo
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ALASKA MOUNTAIN GLACIERS RETREATING DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Tighten your seat belt! This runway is made of ice. Welcome to Ruth Glacier, deep inside Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve. Some of the visitors are here for recreational activities, such as backcountry skiing, but this is no vacation for University of Maine paleoclimatologist Karl Kreutz and his team. For them, time on the ice is all part of the job. With support from the National Science Foundation, the scientists are working to reconstruct the climate history of this area over the last thousand years. They’re researching the relationship between the temperatures and precipitation rates, and the response of glaciers in this area to climate changes. In 2013, the team drilled ice cores high atop Denali’s Mount Hunter. By carefully analyzing ice layers inside the cores, the team is developing a record of temperature change in the Alaska range over the last millennium. While the vast majority of glacier ice on our planet lies in Greenland and Antarctica, Kreutz says the glaciers in Alaska could also make a significant contribution to global sea-level-rise in the coming decades.
Provided by the National Science Foundation
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