Publication: MIS-11 duration key to disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet
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2017-07-06
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Nature Publishing Group
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Abstract
Palaeo data suggest that Greenland must have been largely ice free during Marine Isotope Stage 11 (MIS-11). However, regional summer insolation anomalies were modest during this time compared to MIS-5e, when the Greenland ice sheet likely lost less volume. Thus it remains unclear how such conditions led to an almost complete disappearance of the ice sheet. Here we use transient climate-ice sheet simulations to simultaneously constrain estimates of regional temperature anomalies and Greenland's contribution to the MIS-11 sea-level highstand. We find that Greenland contributed 6.1m (3.9-7.0 m, 95% credible interval) to sea level, similar to 7 kyr after the peak in regional summer temperature anomalies of 2.8 degrees C (2.1-3.4 degrees C). The moderate warming produced a mean rate of mass loss in sea-level equivalent of only around 0.4m per kyr, which means the long duration of MIS-11 interglacial conditions around Greenland was a necessary condition for the ice sheet to disappear almost completely.
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©The Author(s) 2017. We would like to thank M. Perrette for support concerning statistics and R. Greve for providing the ice sheet model SICOPOLIS. A. R. was funded by the Marie Curie 7th framework programme project EURICE (European Ice Sheet Model Initiative, Grant PIEF-GA-2012-331835) and is funded currently by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad project MOCCA (Modelling Abrupt Climate Change, Grant CGL2014-59384-R). R. C. was funded by the Leibniz Association grant SAW-2014-PIK-1 and is now funded by the Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) grants PalMod-1.1-TP5 and PalMod-1.3-TP4.