Publications by authors named "E J Steig"
Article Synopsis
- The Greenland Ice Sheet's (GrIS) persistence during the Pleistocene impacts our understanding of past sea level rise and future climate projections.
- Researchers studied glacial till from beneath 3 km of ice at Summit, Greenland, revealing a stable land surface with plant and animal remnants.
- Evidence shows that central Greenland was tundra-covered during the Pleistocene, helping to clarify how the Arctic ecosystem responded to periods of ice melting.
Article Synopsis
- - Scientists found sediment in the Camp Century ice core that shows northwestern Greenland was ice-free during the Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11, about 416,000 years ago.
- - The sediment was dated using luminescence methods, indicating it was laid down by flowing water in a previously ice-free area.
- - Ice sheet models suggest that for Greenland to be ice-free at that time, there would need to be a sea level rise equivalent to at least 1.4 meters from the Greenland Ice Sheet.
West Antarctica has experienced dramatic ice losses contributing to global sea-level rise in recent decades, particularly from Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. Although these ice losses manifest an ongoing Marine Ice Sheet Instability, projections of their future rate are confounded by limited observations along West Antarctica's coastal perimeter with respect to how the pace of retreat can be modulated by variations in climate forcing. Here, we derive a comprehensive, 12-year record of glacier retreat around West Antarctica's Pacific-facing margin and compare this dataset to contemporaneous estimates of ice flow, mass loss, the state of the Southern Ocean and the atmosphere.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe recovery of long-term climate proxy records with seasonal resolution is rare because of natural smoothing processes, discontinuities and limitations in measurement resolution. Yet insolation forcing, a primary driver of multimillennial-scale climate change, acts through seasonal variations with direct impacts on seasonal climate. Whether the sensitivity of seasonal climate to insolation matches theoretical predictions has not been assessed over long timescales.
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