About 1.3 billion years ago two small black holes, each weighing in at about 30 solar masses, ran into one another and fused. At that time Earthly life forms had neither mouths nor anuses, nor even a nervous system, and they were not much bigger than a sand grain. The distant collision involved  rapid acceleration of considerable masses. A century ago Albert Einstein predicted that the movement of any matter in the universe should perturb space-time in a wave-like form that travels at the same speed as light. Well, he was right for, at 9:50:45 universal time on 14 September 2015, four exquisitely engineered mirrors deployed in the two set-ups of a Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Louisiana and Washington states in the US minutely shuddered, first in the Deep South and 0.007 seconds later in the Pacific Northwest. The signal lasted 0.25 seconds and, when rendered as sound, comprised a sort of chirrup starting at 35 Hz and rising to 250 Hz before an abrupt end. Five months later, and silent internationally shared theoretical verification, the story was released to the back slapping, stamping and pawing the air that we have come to expect from clever, ambitious and persuasive people who have spent a great deal of our money and have something to show for it. So now we know that the universe is probably throbbing – albeit very, very, very quietly – with gravitational waves generated by every single motion that has taken place in the whole of ‘recorded’ history since the Big Bang. Indeed, it is claimed, LIGO-like machines may one day detect the big wave itself if, that is, it hasn’t already passed through the solar system. Recall, 13.7 billion years ago the Big Bang didn’t take much longer than this comparatively mundane collision at 1.3 Ga . Physicists are going to have a lot to ponder on now they have a lever to get yet greater funds. To put all this in perspective, the detected chirrup had been traveling for 1.3 Ga, and so too must the actual place in the universe where it took place: I guess we will never know where it is now or what damage or otherwise may have been visited upon planetary systems in its vicinity, if indeed it had even the slightest recognisable geological or ecological consequence.

So, onto the mundane world of glaciology and climate change.

Tibet is the third greatest repository of glacial ice on the surface of the Earth’s continents. It is the focus of one of the planet’s greatest climatic system, the South Asian. While much of the Plateau hasn’t borne glaciers continuously throughout even the last glacial cycle, it is becoming clear that its western margin has remained cold enough to retain ice throughout an even longer period. In the Kunlun mountains is a 200 km² ice cap known as the Guliya. At the start of detailed glacial stratigraphic ventures in 1990s, focused mainly on Greenland and Antarctica, analysis of a core from the Guliya ice cap yielded dates extending back to 130 ka, before the start if the last interglacial. This section lies above ice that at the time could not be dated reliably other than to show that it may be older than about 750 ka. This stemmed from its lack of the radioactive ³⁶Cl formed, similarly to ¹⁴C, by cosmic-ray interactions with stable ³⁵Cl in atmospheric salt aerosols: such cosmogenic chlorine can be used for radiometric dating of ice younger than 750 ka.

A News Feature in the 29 January issue of Science (Qiu, J. 2016. Tibet’s primeval ice. Science, v. 351, p. 436-439) focused on the preliminary results of an expedition, led by Yao Tandong of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Beijing and Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, Columbus, to drill a further five ice cores at Guliya in September 2015, one of which penetrated ove 300 m of glacial ice. It is now possible to date ice layers back to a million years using argon isotopes. Combined with stable isotope and other measurements through the cores, the dating should provide a huge amount of new information on the evolution of the monsoon, which is currently understood only vaguely. Such information would sharpen models of how the monsoon system works and even hint at how it might change during a period of anthropogenic warming. An estimated 1.4 billion people – a fifth of humanity – who live in the Indian subcontinent, China and SE Asia depend for their food-production on the monsoon.

With less humanitarian urgency but equally fascinating is the discovery that, as well as sea-ice, the central Arctic Ocean once hosted vast ice shelves during the last-but-one glacial episode (Jakobsson, M. and 24 others 2016. Evidence for an ice shelf covering the central Arctic Ocean during the penultimate glaciations. Nature Communications, v. 7, doi:10.1038/ncomms10365. Clues emerged from multibeam sonar bathymetry that created detailed images of topography on the floor of the Arctic Ocean. These revealed sets of parallel ridges on the shallowest parts of the polar basin, thought to have formed when moving ice shelves grounded. The depths of the grooved areas indicate ice thicknesses up to and exceeding 1 km. The grooves look very similar to the large-scale lineaments that formed on the surface of the Canadian Shield when the Laurentide ice sheet ground its way from zones of glacial accumulation. Grounding of an ice shelf would have resulted in its thickening in the upflow direction as a result of plastic deformation of the ice, tending to lock the flow and direct ice escape over the deeper parts of the Arctic basin.

Back-tracking the grooves defines the ice shelf’s source regions in the northern Canadian islands, north Scandinavia and the lowlands of eastern Siberia as well as regional flow patterns and the extent of floating continental ice. The last is a major surprise: at over 4 million km² it was four times larger than all modern Antarctic ice shelves. The ice moved to ‘escape’ to the North Atlantic Ocean through the Fram Strait between East Greenland and Svalbard (Spitzbergen). Dating sediment stratigraphy in the grooved areas using magnetic and fossil data shows that the ice shelves existed between 160 and 140 ka during the penultimate glacial maximum. For such a mass of glacial ice to be expelled into the Arctic Ocean implies that a great deal more snow fell on its fringes then than during the last glacial maximum. Another possibility is that the huge mass of floating ice regulated the salinity and density of the upper Atlantic in a different way from the periodic iceberg ‘armadas’ that characterized the last glacial epoch and help account for a whole number of sudden warming and cooling events.

Related articles

Domack, E. 2016. A great Arctic ice shelf. Nature, v. 530, p. 163-164.

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