Alaska’s Melting Glaciers Could Lead To Major Disturbances In Climate

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LONG-STANDING ASSUMPTIONS concerning the succession of events that led to the retreat of the glaciers in the last Ice Age and the major disturbances in the planet’s atmosphere that followed have been turned on their head. Most scientists believe that the chain of events started in the North Atlantic Ocean, which then affected the Pacific Ocean.

But the article “Large-scale changes in Earth’s climate may originate in the Pacific” by Gloria Dickie for the Science News website states that new data indicates that they may occur on the other side of the planet in the Pacific Ocean.

People think that the Atlantic is where all the action is but we’re saying it’s the other way around.

Dickie’s article has the sub-title of “Long ago, ‘catastrophic’ purge of North America’s western ice sheet may have kicked off losses to the east” and was published on October 8, 2020.

The article claims that the retreat of North America’s ice sheets may have begun with the loss of ice into the North Pacific Ocean along the coast of British Columbia and Alaska.

“In a new study published October 1 in Science, researchers find that these pulses of rapid ice loss from what’s known as the western Cordilleran ice sheet contributed to, and perhaps triggered, the massive calving of the Laurentide ice sheet into the North Atlantic Ocean thousands of years ago. That collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet, which at one point covered large swaths of Canada and parts of the United States, ultimately led to major disturbances in the global climate.

The new findings cast doubt on the long-held assumption that hemispheric-scale changes in Earth’s climate originate in the North Atlantic. The study suggests that the melting of Alaska’s remaining glaciers into the North Pacific, though less extreme than purges of the past, could have far-ranging effects on global ocean circulation and the climate in coming centuries.

‘People typically think that the Atlantic is where all the action is, and everything else follows,’ says Alan Mix, a paleoclimatologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. ‘We’re saying it’s the other way around.’ The Cordilleran ice sheet fails earlier in the chain of reaction, ‘and then that signal is transmitted [from the Pacific] around the world like falling dominoes.’ ”

To read the entire article, click here.

Long-standing assumptions concerning the retreat of the glaciers in the last Ice Age and the massive changes in the planet’s atmosphere that followed have been turned on their head. Click To Tweet

FEATURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is the Blackstone glacier behind Prince William Sound in the Bay of Alaska. The image was taken from aboard the JOIDES Resolution at the start of a 2013 expedition to drill for sediment cores. (Photo: Carlos Alvarez Zarikian, IODP/TAMU.)

Neal Umphred

Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).

I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)

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alaska’s melting glaciers could lead to major disturbances in climate

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