Ancient Antarctic Ice Melt Increased Sea Levels by Over 3 Meters — and We’re Headed There Again

Antarctic Ice Core

Fine layers of ancient volcanic ash in the ice helped the team pinpoint when the mass melting took place. Credit: AntarcticScience.com

Rising ocean temperatures drove the melting of Antarctic ice sheets and caused extreme sea level rise more than 100,000 years ago, a new international study led by UNSW Sydney shows — and the scientists say we’re headed in that direction again.

Mass melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was a major cause of high sea levels during a period known as the Last Interglacial (129,000-116,000 years ago), an international team of scientists led by UNSW’s Chris Turney has found. The research was published on February 11, 2020, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The extreme ice loss caused a multi-meter rise in global mean sea levels – and it took less than 2˚C of ocean warming for it to occur.

“Not only did we lose a lot of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but this happened very early during the Last Interglacial,” says Chris Turney, Professor in Earth and Climate Science at UNSW Sydney and lead author of the study.

Fine layers of ancient volcanic ash in the ice helped the team pinpoint when the mass melting took place. Alarmingly, the results indicated that most ice losses occurred within the first millennia, showing how sensitive the Antarctic is to higher temperatures.

“The melting was likely caused by less than 2°C ocean warming – and that’s something that has major implications for the future, given the ocean temperature increase and West Antarctic melting that’s happening today,” Professor Turney says.

During the Last Interglacial, polar ocean temperatures were likely less than 2˚C (3.6˚F) warmer than today, making it a useful period to study how future global warming might affect ice dynamics and sea levels.

Blue Ice Antarctica

Blue ice areas are created by fierce, high-density winds that remove the top layer of snow and erode the exposed ice. As the ice is removed, ancient ice flows up to the surface, offering an insight into the ice sheet’s history. Credit: AntarcticScience.cm

“This study shows that we would lose most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in a warmer world,” says Professor Turney.

In contrast to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet – which mostly sits on high ground – the West Antarctic sheet rests on the seabed. It’s fringed by large areas of floating ice, called ice shelves, that protect the central part of the sheet.

As warmer ocean water travels into cavities beneath the ice shelves, ice melts from below, thinning the shelves and making the central ice sheet highly vulnerable to warming ocean temperatures.

Going back in time

To undertake their research, Professor Turney and his team traveled to the Patriot Hills Blue Ice Area, a site located at the periphery of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with support from Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions (or ALE).

Blue ice areas are the perfect laboratory for scientists due to their unique topography – they are created by fierce, high-density katabatic winds. When these winds blow over mountains, they remove the top layer of snow and erode the exposed ice. As the ice is removed, ancient ice flows up to the surface, offering an insight into the ice sheet’s history.

While most Antarctic researchers drill down into the ice core to extract their samples, this team used a different method – horizontal ice core analysis.

Trace Gas Bubbles in Ice

Trace gas bubbles in the ice samples. Credit: AntarcticScience.com

“Instead of drilling kilometers into the ice, we can simply walk across a blue ice area and travel back through millennia. By taking samples of ice from the surface we are able to reconstruct what happened to this precious environment in the past,” Professor Turney says.

Through isotope measurements, the team discovered a gap in the ice sheet record immediately prior to the Last Interglacial. This period of missing ice coincides with the extreme sea level increase, suggesting rapid ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The volcanic ash, trace gas samples and ancient DNA from bacteria trapped in the ice all support this finding.

Learning from the Last Interglacial

Ice age cycles occur approximately every 100,000 years due to subtle changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun. These ice ages are separated by warm interglacial periods. The Last Interglacial is the most recent warm period to our current interglacial period, the Holocene.

While the human contribution to global warming makes the Holocene unique, the Last Interglacial remains a useful research point to understand how the planet responds to extreme change.

“The future is heading far beyond the range of anything we’ve seen observed in the scientific instrumental record of the last 150 years,” says Professor Turney. “We have to look further into the past if we’re going to manage future changes.”

During the Last Interglacial, global mean sea levels were between 6m and 9m higher than present day, although some scientists suspect this could have reached 11m.

The sea level rise in the Last Interglacial can’t be fully explained by the Greenland Ice Sheet melt, which accounted for a 2m increase, or ocean expansion from warmer temperatures and melting mountain glaciers, which are thought to have caused less than a 1m increase.

“We now have some of the first major evidence that West Antarctica melted and drove a large part of this sea level rise,” says Professor Turney.

An urgent need to minimize future warming

The severity of the ice loss suggests that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is highly sensitive to future ocean warming.

“The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is sitting in water, and today this water is getting warmer and warmer,” says Professor Turney, who is also a Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH).

Using data gained from their fieldwork, the team ran model simulations to investigate how warming might affect the floating ice shelves. These shelves currently buttress the ice sheets and help slow the flow of ice off the continent.

The results suggest a 3.8m sea level rise during the first thousand years of a 2˚C warmer ocean. Most of the modeled sea level rise occurred after the loss of the ice shelves, which collapsed within the first two hundred years of higher temperatures.

The researchers are concerned that persistent high sea surface temperatures would prompt the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to melt, driving global sea levels even higher.

“The positive feedbacks between a warming ocean, ice shelf collapse, and ice sheet melt suggest that the West Antarctic may be vulnerable to passing a tipping point,” stressed Dr. Zoë Thomas, co-author and ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellow at UNSW.

“As it reaches the tipping point, only a small increase in temperature could trigger abrupt ice sheet melt and a multi-meter rise in global sea level.”

At present, the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2013 report suggests that the global sea level will rise between 40cm (16in) and 80cm(31in) over the next century, with Antarctica only contributing around 5cm (2in) of this.

The researchers are concerned that Antarctica’s contribution could be much greater than this.

“Recent projections suggest that the Antarctic contribution may be up to ten times higher than the IPCC forecast, which is deeply worrying,” says Professor Christopher Fogwill, co-author and Director of The Institute for Sustainable Futures at the UK University of Keele.

“Our study highlights that the Antarctic Ice Sheet may lie close to a tipping point, which once passed may commit us to rapid sea level rise for millennia to come. This underlines the urgent need to reduce and control greenhouse gas emissions that are driving warming today.”

Notably, the researchers warn that this tipping point may be closer than we think.

“The Paris Climate Agreement commits to restricting global warming to 2˚C (3.6˚F), ideally 1.5˚C (2.7˚F), this century,” says Professor Turney.

“Our findings show that we don’t want to get close to 2˚C (3.6˚F) warming.”

Professor Turney and his team hope to expand the research to confirm just how quickly the West Antarctic Ice Sheet responded to warming and which areas were first affected.

“We only tested one location, so we don’t know whether it was the first sector of Antarctica that melted, or whether it melted relatively late. How these changes in Antarctica impacted the rest of the world remains a huge unknown as the planet warms into the future” he says.

“Testing other locations will give us a better idea for the areas we really need to monitor as the planet continues to warm.”

Reference: “Early Last Interglacial ocean warming drove substantial ice mass loss from Antarctica” by Chris S. M. Turney, Christopher J. Fogwill, Nicholas R. Golledge, Nicholas P. McKay, Erik van Sebille, Richard T. Jones, David Etheridge, Mauro Rubino, David P. Thornton, Siwan M. Davies, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Zoë A. Thomas, Michael I. Bird, Niels C. Munksgaard, Mika Kohno, John Woodward, Kate Winter, Laura S. Weyrich, Camilla M. Rootes, Helen Millman, Paul G. Albert, Andres Rivera, Tas van Ommen, Mark Curran, Andrew Moy, Stefan Rahmstorf, Kenji Kawamura, Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand, Michael E. Weber, Christina J. Manning, Jennifer Young, and Alan Cooper, 11 February 2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1902469117

10 Comments on "Ancient Antarctic Ice Melt Increased Sea Levels by Over 3 Meters — and We’re Headed There Again"

  1. Back then, the people who populated planet earth have produced much more CO2 as we these days!
    They have not know that, and caused big problems for us today!
    But the problem is not so big when! We will pay taxes for carbon emission on a carbon based planet, and then will be all OK!!!

  2. The Chinese and Indians must have been firing up their coal burning plants even back then. Gee!!!

  3. It’s worse than stated….
    3.5 mya, in the Pliocene, seas were 70ft deeper and CO2 was at 390ppm.
    We are already at 410ppm CO2, and climbing at +2.5ppm per year.
    We will be at 500ppm by 2060, or sooner as the rate will likely increase.
    We will blast through the +2C temperature increase level, and go to +4C or even higher if we don’t get serious about this.
    Which I do not expect.
    At the moment, fools are in control.

  4. the world will survive, humans maybe not

  5. Salvatore J Contarino | December 21, 2020 at 6:26 pm | Reply

    Morons who have no clue what they are talking about. The article states that ice ages occur because of changes in the sun and earth’s wobble. Yet they somehow come back to some co2 bs and global warming

  6. All this and more inspite of imposed golbal authoritian non solutions.

  7. KnuckleDragger | May 13, 2021 at 7:23 am | Reply

    It is based on models…plug in the numbers you ‘guess’ are correct and the model says what you want it to say. Best guess? The earth is warming. Is it caused by human activity? Possibly. Can we control it? No, because factors beyond our control determine cooling and warming geological periods of earth’s climate. Does ‘carbon capture help’? Not proven, BUT it will make a lot of greedy people rich AND if it makes you feel better then capture away. WHAT HUBRIS on our part to think we can control the Earth’s temperature.

  8. Clyde Spencer | May 30, 2021 at 6:11 pm | Reply

    Where did the volcanic ash come from? Perhaps from one or more of the 90-some volcanoes recently found under the Western Antarctic ice sheet?

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