A reconciled solution of Meltwater Pulse 1A sources using sea-level fingerprinting

• Published in: Nature Communications
• Main Authors: Lin, Yucheng, Hibbert, Fiona, Whitehouse, Pippa L., Woodroffe, Sarah A., Purcell, Anthony, Shennan, Ian, Bradley, Sarah L.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group UK
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/267446; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21990-y; https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/267446/3/s41467-021-21990-y.pdf.jpg

The most rapid global sea-level rise event of the last deglaciation, Meltwater Pulse 1A (MWP-1A), occurred ∼14,650 years ago. Considerable uncertainty regarding the sources of meltwater limits understanding of the relationship between MWP-1A and the concurrent fast-changing climate. Here we present a data-driven inversion approach, using a glacioisostatic adjustment model to invert for the sources of MWP-1A via sea-level constraints from six geographically distributed sites. The results suggest contributions from Antarctica, 1.3 m (0–5.9 m; 95% probability), Scandinavia, 4.6 m (3.2–6.4 m) and North America, 12.0 m (5.6–15.4 m), giving a global mean sea-level rise of 17.9 m (15.7–20.2 m) in 500 years. Only a North American dominant scenario successfully predicts the observed sea-level change across our six sites and an Antarctic dominant scenario is firmly refuted by Scottish isolation basin records. Our sea-level based results therefore reconcile with field-based ice-sheet reconstructions. Y.L. was supported by China Scholarship Council—Durham University joint scholarship. F.D.H. received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement (No. 838841—ExTaSea). S.L.B. was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council consortium grant BRITICE-CHRONO NE/J009768/1 and has benefited from the PalGlac team of researchers and received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) to Chris Clark under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 787263). The collection of the Scottish isolation basin data was supported by NERC Grants GST/02/0760 and GST/02/0761. The authors acknowledge PALSEA, a working group of the International Union for Quaternary Sciences (INQUA) and Past Global Changes (PAGES), which in turn received support from the Swiss Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. GIA calculations in this study were performed on the Terrawulf cluster, a computational ...