Late glacial fluctuations of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the White Mountains of Maine and New Hampshire, U.S.A.

Abstract

Prominent moraines deposited by the Laurentide Ice Sheet in northern New England document readvances, or stillstands, of the ice margin during overall deglaciation. However, until now, the paucity of direct chronologies over much of the region has precluded meaningful assessment of the mechanisms that drove these events, or of the complex relationships between ice-sheet dynamics and climate. As a step towards addressing this problem, we present a cosmogenic 10Be surface-exposure chronology from the Androscoggin moraine complex, located in the White Mountains of western Maine and northern New Hampshire, as well as four recalculated ages from the nearby Littleton–Bethlehem moraine. Seven internally consistent 10Be ages from the Androscoggin terminal moraines indicate that advance culminated ~ 13.2 ± 0.8 ka, in close agreement with the mean age of the neighboring Littleton–Bethlehem complex. Together, these two datasets indicate stabilization or advance of the ice-sheet margin in northern New England, at ~ 14–13 ka, during the Allerød/Greenland Interstadial I.