Melting icebergs key to ice age: New study — ScienceDaily

Melting icebergs key to sequence of an ice age: New study unravels long-standing climate mystery and provides insight into how our planet may change in the future

Scientists claim to have found the ‘missing link’ in the process that leads to an ice age on Earth.

In their study, the team propose that when the orbit of Earth around the sun is just right, Antarctic icebergs begin to melt further and further away from Antarctica, shifting huge volumes of freshwater away from the Southern Ocean and into the Atlantic Ocean.

As the Southern Ocean gets saltier and the North Atlantic gets fresher, large-scale ocean circulation patterns begin to dramatically change, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and reducing the so-called greenhouse effect.

This in turn pushes the Earth into ice age conditions. …

Lead author of the study Aidan Starr, from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: “We were astonished to find that this lead-lag relationship was present during the onset of every ice age for the last 1.6 million years. Such a leading role for the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in global climate has been speculated but seeing it so clearly in geological evidence was very exciting.”

Antarctic icebergs reorganize ocean circulation during Pleistocene glacials

Iceberg-trajectory models along with multi-proxy evidence from sediment cores from the Indian Ocean show that northward shifts in Antarctic iceberg melt redistributed freshwater in the Southern Ocean during the Pleistocene.

New scientific model solves mystery: how could climate change occur without Republicans?