Toward New and Independent Constraints on Global Mean Sea‐Level Highstands During the Last Glaciation (Marine Isotope Stage 3, 5a, and 5c)

Abstract

Despite the importance of quantifying how ice sheets will respond to ongoing and future climate change, little is known about variations in ice sheet size, or even global sea level, in response to large temperature changes across most of the last glacial cycle (120,000 years ago to today). Knowledge of how ice sheets respond to climatic warming is critical, as ice sheet behavior during past climate variations informs understanding of the nature and resilience of the Earth's climate system (Dutton et al., 2015). Ice volume variations through the last glacial cycle are a direct and sensitive measure of climate change. However, the magnitude and timescale of global sea-level fluctuations prior to the

Rapid Laurentide Ice Sheet growth preceding the Last Glacial Maximum due to summer snowfall

“…Interestingly, despite the large spread in ice sheet/sea-level reconstructions during MIS 3 using different reconstruction methods, monotonically rapid decreases in sea level after around 32 ka are consistently depicted across these reconstructions (Fig. 1h) 22 . Moreover, given such fundamental ice sheet differences before the final phase of ice growth it is open to question how these differences impact on the North American ice sheet evolution towards the LGM.…”