Abstract
During the last ice age, ice sheets covered large portions of North America, Europe, Asia, and the Arctic Ocean. The ice sheets were composed of meteoric water, enriched in the light isotope of oxygen (16O), leaving oceanic seawater correspondingly enriched1,2 in 18O. The volume of past continental ice sheets during the last glacial maximum 18,000 yr ago has been estimated from terrestrial evidence of ice limits3, glaciological modelling4, the δ18O of foraminifera from deep sea cores5,6, and sea-level evidence from raised coral terraces7,8. Oxygen isotope studies of planktonic foraminifera reveal that δ18O shifts during deglaciations in areas near sources of ice meltwater, like the Gulf of Mexico and Labrador Sea/Baffin Bay, are often larger than the corresponding average global oceanic shift9–11 and that these variations reflect the timing of ice decay without the ocean-mixing lag contained in both distal and benthic δ10O variations12. We show here that geographically-distinct planktonic δ18O gradients can be related to the volume of meltwater discharged through specific meltwater outlets and thus to the initial volume of the ice sheets at the commencement of deglaciation and to the subsequent dynamics of ice-sheet decay.
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Fillon, R., Williams, D. Dynamics of meltwater discharge from Northern Hemisphere ice sheets during the last deglaciation. Nature 310, 674–677 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1038/310674a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/310674a0
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