Minimal East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat onto land during the past eight million years

• Published in: Nature (London) Vol. 558; no. 7709; pp. 284 - 287
• Main Authors: Shakun, Jeremy D., Corbett, Lee B., Bierman, Paul R., Underwood, Kristen, Rizzo, Donna M., Zimmerman, Susan R., Caffee, Marc W., Naish, Tim, Golledge, Nicholas R., Hay, Carling C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.06.2018; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 704/106/125; 704/106/413; Antarctic ice sheet; Atmospheric carbon dioxide; Atmospheric models; Bacillariophyceae; Beryllium 10; Carbon dioxide; Carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations; Carbon dioxide concentration; Cosmic radiation; Cosmic rays; cryospheric science; Data analysis; Earth; Evolution; Geology; GEOSCIENCES; Glaciers; Global sea level; Global temperatures; Humanities and Social Sciences; Ice; Ice cover; Ice sheets; Isotopes; Letter; Low concentrations; Marine sediments; multidisciplinary; Natural history; Nuclides; paleoclimate; Plankton; Pliocene; Radiation; Radiation (Physics); Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Sea level; Sea level rise; Sediments; Soil erosion; Surface-ice melting; Uncertainty; Antarctica
• ISSN: 0028-0836; 1476-4687
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0155-6

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is the largest potential contributor to sea-level rise. However, efforts to predict the future evolution of the EAIS are hindered by uncertainty in how it responded to past warm periods, for example, during the Pliocene epoch (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago), when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were last higher than 400 parts per million. Geological evidence indicates that some marine-based portions of the EAIS and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated during parts of the Pliocene 1 , 2 , but it remains unclear whether ice grounded above sea level also experienced retreat. This uncertainty persists because global sea-level estimates for the Pliocene have large uncertainties and cannot be used to rule out substantial terrestrial ice loss 3 , and also because direct geological evidence bearing on past ice retreat on land is lacking. Here we show that land-based sectors of the EAIS that drain into the Ross Sea have been stable throughout the past eight million years. We base this conclusion on the extremely low concentrations of cosmogenic 10 Be and 26 Al isotopes found in quartz sand extracted from a land-proximal marine sediment core. This sediment had been eroded from the continent, and its low levels of cosmogenic nuclides indicate that it experienced only minimal exposure to cosmic radiation, suggesting that the sediment source regions were covered in ice. These findings indicate that atmospheric warming during the past eight million years was insufficient to cause widespread or long-lasting meltback of the EAIS margin onto land. We suggest that variations in Antarctic ice volume in response to the range of global temperatures experienced over this period—up to 2–3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures 4 , corresponding to future scenarios involving carbon dioxide concentrations of between 400 and 500 parts per million—were instead driven mostly by the retreat of marine ice margins, in agreement with the latest models 5 , 6 . Analysis of cosmogenic isotopes from a marine sediment core shows that much of the land-based East Antarctic Ice Sheet has remained stable for the past eight million years, including during the warm Pliocene epoch.