Reconstructing past ice sheet retreat since the Last Glacial Maximum provides a natural experiment for testing how ice sheets respond to large climate and ocean changes over millennial timescales. These reconstructions improve confidence in future sea-level rise projections by identifying the rates, thresholds, and feedbacks that governed past retreat and may re-emerge under modern warming. They also provide essential benchmarks for validating ice sheet models, ensuring that the same processes driving past retreat are accurately captured in simulations of future change. Different sectors of the Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated at markedly different rates following the Last Glacial Maximum, and evidence suggests that some regions even readvanced during the Holocene, though the underlying causes of these contrasting regional behaviors remain debated. Our team uses ice sheet models tightly constrained by geological and paleoclimate data to investigate these regional differences in retreat and readvance, allowing us to disentangle the relative roles of ocean and atmospheric forcing, ice dynamics, subglacial conditions, and Earth structure in shaping Antarctic ice-sheet history.
If you are a prospective student or postdoc interested in exploring this topic further, please contact us to discuss specific works.
Here are some of our recent publications on the topic:
Ocean cavity regime shift reversed West Antarctic grounding line retreat in the late Holocene, published in Nature Communications.
Geologic controls on ice sheet sensitivity to deglacial climate forcing in the Ross Embayment, Antarctica, published in Quaternary Science Advances.
Deglacial grounding-line retreat in the Ross Embayment, Antarctica, controlled by ocean and atmosphere forcing, published in Science Advances.
And here are some associated media articles:
A rapid shift in ocean currents could imperil the world’s largest ice shelf, Science News.
West Antarctica’s ice sheet was smaller thousands of years ago – here’s why this matters today, The Conversation.
New understanding of Antarctic ice shelf melt to improve sea level rise predictions, Stuff (NZ).