Cordilleran Ice Sheet mass loss preceded climate reversals near the Pleistocene Termination

Abstract

Disappearance of an ice sheet The Cordilleran Ice Sheet is thought to have covered westernmost Canada until about 13,000 years ago, even though the warming and sea level rise of the last deglaciation had begun more than a thousand years earlier. This out-of-phase behavior has puzzled glaciologists because it is not clear what mechanisms could account for it. Menounos et al. report measurements of the ages of cirque and valley glaciers that show that much of western Canada was ice-free as early as 14,000 years ago—a finding that better agrees with the record of global ice volume (see the Perspective by Marcott and Shakun). Previous reconstructions seem not to have adequately reflected the complexity of ice sheet decay. Science , this issue p. 781 ; see also p. 721