Education

UF geologist co-authors study revealing ancient mile-thick ice shelf in Baffin Bay

A University of Florida associate professor of geology helped uncover evidence of a massive floating ice shelf that once spanned Baffin Bay roughly 20,000 years ago, holding back three major ice sheets across Greenland and northern Canada. When the shelf vanished over a span of roughly 500 to 1,000 years, the glaciers it had restrained accelerated into the sea, contributing to hundreds of feet of sea level rise. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, offer scientists new data to model how today’s Antarctic ice shelves might behave and how quickly their loss could raise modern sea levels.

Sources: UF News