Antarctic Ice Sheet Is More Vulnerable to Carbon Dioxide than Expected

Results from a new climate reconstruction of how Antarctica's ice sheets responded during the last period when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) reached levels like those expected to occur in about 30 years, plus sediment core findings reported in a companion paper, suggest that the ice sheets are more vulnerable to rising atmospheric CO2 than previously thought.

Details appear in two papers in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers led by Edward Gasson and Robert DeConto at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with colleagues at Pennsylvania State University and GNS Science, New Zealand, report results of a climate and ice sheet modeling study, while Richard Levy of New Zealand and colleagues with the National Science Foundation's Antarctic drilling program (ANDRILL), report their analyses of a 3,735-foot sediment core from McMurdo Sound to reconstruct the Antarctic ice sheets' history.

The authors state that taken together, the findings highlight that large changes in the Antarctic ice sheets may be possible at lower levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide than previous studies have shown.
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But this does not mean that melting Antarctic ice sheets will raise global sea levels immediately, the researchers say.  "The ice sheets will take hundreds of years to respond, so although CO2 may be at the same level as during the Miocene in the next 30 years, it doesn't mean that they will melt in 30 years," Gasson adds.

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