{"id":1008,"date":"2018-06-13T16:29:02","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T15:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk\/in-abstract\/?p=1008"},"modified":"2018-08-31T13:22:51","modified_gmt":"2018-08-31T12:22:51","slug":"history-of-glaciation-in-nw-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk\/in-abstract\/history-of-glaciation-in-nw-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"Extensive marine-terminating ice sheets in Europe from 2.5 million years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unravelling the early history of glaciation in NW Europe by looking under the North Sea<\/strong><\/p>\n

From 2.58 to 0.78 million years ago, ice sheets waxed and waned across northwest Europe. The evidence for this comes from material deposited by icebergs in the North Atlantic Ocean. However, though this information is useful, it provides limited information on the geometries and dynamics of the ancient ice sheets providing these icebergs. This is a crucial gap in our understanding of past ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere coupling. Other records suggest that from 1.2 million years ago, ice sheet behaviour changed in response to the Earth\u2019s orbit around the Sun, resulting in volumetrically larger and longer-lived ice sheets. Now, researchers from the University of Manchester, with their collaborators around the UK and in Denmark, have carried out, a multi-discipline analysis on sediments buried up to a kilometre below the present-day seafloor of the North Sea. This showed that ice sheets repeatedly advanced into the North Sea from 2.53 million years ago, before eventually advancing to the centre of the North Sea and joining the Scandinavian Ice Sheet 1.87 million years ago. This has dramatic and paradigm-shifting implications for our understanding of ancient ice sheets and suggests that although thinner, through the complex interplay of ice physics and geology, these ancient ice sheets were near comparable in spatial extent to those from the more recent past.<\/p>\n

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