A 10,000-Year Record of Arctic Ocean Sea-Ice Variability—View from the Beach
Abstract
We present a sea-ice record from northern Greenland covering the past 10,000 years. Multiyear sea ice reached a minimum between ~8500 and 6000 years ago, when the limit of year-round sea ice at the coast of Greenland was located ~1000 kilometers to the north of its present position. The subsequent increase in multiyear sea ice culminated during the past 2500 years and is linked to an increase in ice export from the western Arctic and higher variability of ice-drift routes. When the ice was at its minimum in northern Greenland, it greatly increased at Ellesmere Island to the west. The lack of uniformity in past sea-ice changes, which is probably related to large-scale atmospheric anomalies such as the Arctic Oscillation, is not well reproduced in models. This needs to be further explored, as it is likely to have an impact on predictions of future sea-ice distribution.
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Published In
Science
Volume 333 | Issue 6043
5 August 2011
5 August 2011
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 11 January 2011
Accepted: 14 June 2011
Published in print: 5 August 2011
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments: The field work was funded mainly by the Danish Research Council (FNU) and the Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland (KVUG) with grants to S.F. and K.K. Logistic planning and support came from the Danish Polar Centre. P.M. and N.K.L. thank the Swedish Research Council (VR) for financial support and the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat for logistic support. A.L. thanks the Norwegian Research Council (SciencePub) and the Geological Survey of Norway for support. H.G. is a Research Associate with the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS-Belgium). N. Fischer of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology provided sea-level pressure maps (see supporting online material).
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