Ice core shows North American ice sheet’s retreat affected Antarctic weather

Sea ice and icebergs in the Southern Ocean in 2017 off the coast of West Antarctica. The new study looks at the year-to-year variability of storms in this region.

Researchers at the University of Washington were among the co-authors of a new study that uses ice core data to see how Earth’s climate behaved at the end of the last ice age, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet covering much of North America retreated about 16,000 years ago.

The study led by the University of Colorado Boulder is published online this week and will be in the Feb. 15 print issue of the journal Nature.

“Our data are from just one location in Antarctica, but the results provide an indication of how climate variability changed across most of the Southern Hemisphere — and perhaps most of the globe — as the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets receded at the end of the ice age,” said co-author Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences.