9 September 2010

By: Tudor Vieru, Science Editor

The Last Ice Age Ended 'Suspiciously'

A team of investigators may have just found an explanation for why Antarctica was warming up while the rest of the world was locked in the final pulsations of the last Ice Age. The period, known as the Younger Dryas, was a period of abrupt cooling, that took place as the last glacial period was coming at an end. Temperatures were beginning to rise, when this final blast of cold swept over the Northern Hemisphere. While this began happening, some 12,800 years ago, Antarctica was heating up in the south, and experts have been at a loss in explaining precisely why that was happening. The cold temperatures endured for about 1,300 years, may a bit more, and the cold seemed to imply that the Ice Age had returned. But that was obviously not the case, geological records show. What the ice core samples researchers collect do show is that heating and cooling occurred on the planet simultaneously, but at different poles. This was discovered about two decades ago. Ever since, scientists have been looking into this issue, but no satisfactory explanation was ever found. In a new study, it was proved that the warming affected not only Antarctica, but also New Zealand. The paper, which appears in the latest issue of the top-rated scientific journal Nature, basically appears to suggest that the area that was heated up in the Younger Dryas was not limited to the South Pole. "New advances in the use of cosmogenic isotopes [used in this research] allow dating with hundreds of years' resolution, and correlation of key deposits such as the moraines in New Zealand," explains expert Enriqueta Barrera. "Further application of this technique will reveal the details of climate change in different regions since the last glaciations," adds Barrera, who is the program director of the US National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences (DES). The DES provided the funds required for the new work, which was conducted by researchers at the Columbia University, in Ithaca, New York. "Glaciers in New Zealand receded dramatically at this time [Younger Dryas], suggesting that much of the southern hemisphere was warming with Antarctica," explains geochemist Michael Kaplan, the lead author of the study. He is based at the CU Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "Knowing that the Younger Dryas cooling in the northern hemisphere was not a global event brings us closer to understanding how Earth finally came out of the Ice Age," he adds.

Geologists have found clues to past climate changes in New Zealand's melting glaciers Government of New Zealand

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"Understanding how regional changes influence global climate will allow scientists to more accurately predict regional variations in rain and snowfall," concludes Lamont-Doherty geochemist Bob Anderson.

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