(ORDO NEWS) — The glacier in the area of Queen Maud Land was actively melting during the Stone Age.
Sixty percent of the world‘s fresh water is concentrated in the Antarctic ice sheets. This is about 30 million cubic meters of ice, and if it melted, the sea level would rise by 58 meters.
Today, due to climate warming, the Antarctic ice sheet is gradually shrinking, and in this regard, scientists are concerned about the possible consequences.
Now Irina Rogozhina and her colleagues have explored the ice on Queen Maud Land in East Antarctica. The results show that this sector of the ice sheet has changed a lot over time and has been melting quite recently.
This happened after the end of the last ice age, during which massive ice sheets covered North America, northern Europe, and southern South America.
When these ice sheets melted, they raised sea levels by more than 100 meters.
“Based on the data we presented in our study, we concluded that the East Antarctic ice sheet on Dronning Maud Land melted rapidly along its margins between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago, in the middle of the Holocene. At that time, in many parts of the world, summers were warmer than they are now,” Rogozhina said.
These conclusions were made on the basis of an analysis of the surface of the rocks of Antarctica. Their surface changes under the action of cosmic rays, and the ice protects against them.
Thanks to this, it is possible to restore the periods in which the stones were in the open air. At the same time, the reasons for the melting of ice in the middle of the Holocene are not clear to scientists.
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