Rapid northern hemisphere ice sheet melting during the penultimate deglaciation

• Main Authors: Stoll, Heather, Cacho, Isabel, Gasson, Edward, Sliwinski, Jakub, Kost, Oliver, Moreno Caballud, Ana, Iglesias, Miguel, Torner, Judit, Pérez-Mejías, Carlos, Haghipour, Negar, Cheng, Hai, Edwards, R. Lawrence
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España), Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España), National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Science Foundation (US), Generalitat de Catalunya, Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (España), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España), Royal Society (UK)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2022
• Subjects: Palaeoceanography; Palaeoclimate; Ice Sheet; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/359481; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31619-3

© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The rate and consequences of future high latitude ice sheet retreat remain a major concern given ongoing anthropogenic warming. Here, new precisely dated stalagmite data from NW Iberia provide the first direct, high-resolution records of periods of rapid melting of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets during the penultimate deglaciation. These records reveal the penultimate deglaciation initiated with rapid century-scale meltwater pulses which subsequently trigger abrupt coolings of air temperature in NW Iberia consistent with freshwater-induced AMOC slowdowns. The first of these AMOC slowdowns, 600-year duration, was shorter than Heinrich 1 of the last deglaciation. Although similar insolation forcing initiated the last two deglaciations, the more rapid and sustained rate of freshening in the eastern North Atlantic penultimate deglaciation likely reflects a larger volume of ice stored in the marine-based Eurasian Ice sheet during the penultimate glacial in contrast to the land-based ice sheet on North America as during the last glacial. The research was funded by HIDROPAST (CGL2010-16376) OPERA (CTM2013-48639-C2-1-R) and CHIMERA (CTM2016-75411-R) all to ...