North American ice-sheet dynamics and the onset of 100,000-year glacial cycles

R. Bintanja () and R. S. W. van de Wal
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R. Bintanja: Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), Wilhelminalaan 10, 3732 GK De Bilt, The Netherlands
R. S. W. van de Wal: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht (IMAU), Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands

Nature, 2008, vol. 454, issue 7206, 869-872

Abstract: Glacial change: the merging North American ice sheets During the past 2.7 million years, Earth's climate has undergone a number of glacial cycles during which the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets successively expanded and retreated. From about a million years ago, the dominant glacial periodicity gradually increased from 41,000 to 100,000 years. What caused the emergence of 100,000-year glacial cycles is something of a mystery, mainly because sufficiently long climatic records are lacking. Richard Bintanja and Roderik van de Wal use a comprehensive ice-sheet model and a simple ocean-temperature model to construct 3-million-year mutually consistent records of temperature, ice volume and sea level from marine oxygen isotope data. Their findings suggest that the switch to 100,000-year cycles may have been due to the increased ability of the merged North American ice sheets to survive insolation maxima and their ultimate collapse on reaching a certain threshold size.

Date: 2008
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DOI: 10.1038/nature07158

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