Sea level fingerprinting of the Bering Strait flooding history detects the source of the Younger Dryas climate event
- Creators
- Pico, T.
- Mitrovica, J. X.
- Mix, A. C.
Abstract
During the Last Glacial Maximum, expansive continental ice sheets lowered globally averaged sea level ~130 m, exposing a land bridge at the Bering Strait. During the subsequent deglaciation, sea level rose rapidly and ultimately flooded the Bering Strait, linking the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. Observational records of the Bering Strait flooding have suggested two apparently contradictory scenarios for the timing of the reconnection. We reconcile these enigmatic datasets using gravitationally self-consistent sea-level simulations that vary the timing and geometry of ice retreat between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets to the southwest of the Bering Strait to fit observations of a two-phased flooding history. Assuming the datasets are robust, we demonstrate that their reconciliation requires a substantial melting of the Cordilleran and western Laurentide Ice Sheet from 13,000 to 11,500 years ago. This timing provides a freshwater source for the widely debated Younger Dryas cold episode (12,900 to 11,700 years ago).
Additional Information
© 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). Submitted 6 June 2019; Accepted 6 December 2019; Published 26 February 2020. We are grateful to R. Ackert for insightful discussions regarding chronology methods. We thank five anonymous reviewers and E. Gowan for comments on previous versions of this manuscript. T.P. was supported by NSF-GRFP. J.X.M. and T.P. acknowledge funding from Harvard University. Author contributions: T.P., A.C.M., and J.X.M. conceived the ideas presented in this manuscript. T.P. conducted modeling research and wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript. The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors. The ice model GI-31, developed in this study, is freely available online in the PANGAEA database.Attached Files
Published - eaay2935.full.pdf
Supplemental Material - aay2935_Data_file_S1.xlsx
Supplemental Material - aay2935_SM.pdf
Files
Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC7043918
- Eprint ID
- 101592
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200226-141432629
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- Harvard University
- Created
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2020-02-26Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-02-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field