r/EarthScience • u/Brighter-Side-News • 19h ago
Canada’s Barnes Ice Cap reveals that human-caused climate change stopped the next ice age
Dead moss emerging from an Arctic ice cap records a reversal in the history of North American ice. The plants grew on ground that was later buried as ice advanced, then reappeared as warmer summers drove retreat. Their ages help reconstruct an expansion that modern warming brought to an end.
The study, published in Science, focuses on the Barnes Ice Cap on Canada's Baffin Island. Nicolás Young and Joerg Schaefer of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory worked with colleagues including Gifford Miller at the University of Colorado Boulder. They investigated the surviving remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which once covered much of northern North America.
Their interpretation reaches beyond one shrinking ice cap. The researchers argue that renewed growth roughly 2,000 years ago marked the earliest stage of the next glacial period. That claim depends partly on how glacial onset is defined, rather than demonstrating that continent-wide ice cover had already returned.