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Palaeoclimatology

Icing the North Atlantic

Nature volume 392, pages 335–337 (1998)Cite this article

The North Atlantic region has experienced large, abrupt climate changes in the past1, and similar changes occur in some models of the future2. But there is disagreement as to whether these changes originate in the North Atlantic itself or are transmitted to the region from elsewhere. In their paper on page 373 of this issue3, McCabe and Clark tackle the question with new data on the extent and movement of the British Ice Sheet, which covered an area around the northern Irish Sea towards the end of the last ice age. From these data, they argue that the advance and retreat of one of the great ice sheets feeding the North Atlantic, the Laurentide, probably caused some of the big climate jumps of the past.

In the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, rapid jumps (sometimes within less than ten years) of up to one-half of the glacial-interglacial amplitude in temperature and other climate variables occurred between climate states. Cold, dry and windy atmospheric conditions around the North Atlantic occurred when the ocean's surface waters were fresh and cold1. Progressive cooling through several such Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, followed by an especially abrupt warming, defines the Bond cycle. The coldest part of each Bond cycle in North Atlantic cores is marked by a so-called Heinrich layer rich in debris transported by icebergs1 (Fig. 1).

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Figure 1: An idealized climate cycle in the North Atlantic region, assuming North-Atlantic-centred models for oscillating North Atlantic Deep Water formation10 and surging of the Laurentide Ice Sheet11; time and temperature scales are approximate.

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  1. the Earth System Science Center and the Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University, 204A Deike Building, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, USA

    Richard B. Alley

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  1. Richard B. Alley
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Alley, R. Icing the North Atlantic. Nature 392, 335–337 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/32781

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