Leveraging the Rapid Retreat of the Amundsen Gulf Ice Stream 13,000 Years Ago to Reveal Insight Into North American Deglaciation
Abstract
We examine the influence of different deglacial histories of the North American ice saddle, which connected the Cordilleran ice sheet and western Laurentide ice sheet, on the stability of the fast‐flowing Amundsen Gulf Ice Stream, located in the northwestern Laurentide ice sheet. We use a simplified marine‐terminating ice stream model to simulate grounding line retreat and compare our predictions to geologic evidence for the rapid collapse of the Amundsen Gulf Ice Stream at 13 ka. We show that observations of ice stream retreat can be used to distinguish between past ice unloading histories, and that the rapid retreat of the Amundsen Gulf Ice Stream near 13 ka is most dynamically consistent with substantial deglaciation of the North American ice saddle from 13 to 11.5 ka, during the Younger Dryas cooling episode. These results suggest that short‐lived changes in ice stream behavior may be used to reveal larger‐scale and longer‐duration ice sheet dynamics.
Additional Information
© 2019 American Geophysical Union. Received 1 AUG 2019; Accepted 1 OCT 2019; Accepted article online 16 OCT 2019; Published online 11 NOV 2019. T.P. acknowledges funding from Harvard University and NSF‐GRFP. Ice models used for this research are available at PANGAEA, a publicly accessible online repository, at https://issues.pangaea.de/browse/PDI‐21803.Attached Files
Published - 2019GL084789.pdf
Supplemental Material - grl59686-sup-0001-grl59686_supp_info.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 100135
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20191202-095015777
- Harvard University
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- Created
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2019-12-02Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field