UC Boulder Study - Baffin Island Ice Caps Shrink By 50%+ Since 1950s - AFP

[hatrack]

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study has shown that ice caps on the northern plateau of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic have shrunk by more than 50 percent in the last half century as a result of warming, and are expected to disappear by the middle of the century.

Radiocarbon dating of dead plant material emerging from beneath the receding ice margins show the Baffin Island ice caps are now smaller in area than at any time in at least the last 1,600 years, said geological sciences Professor Gifford Miller of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "Even with no additional warming, our study indicates these ice caps will be gone in 50 years or less," he said.

The study also showed two distinct bursts of Baffin Island ice-cap growth commencing about 1280 A.D. and 1450 A.D., each coinciding with ice-core records of increases in stratospheric aerosols tied to major tropical volcanic eruptions, Miller said. The unexpected findings "provide tantalizing evidence that the eruptions were the trigger for the Little Ice Age," a period of Northern Hemisphere cooling that lasted from roughly 1250 to 1850, he said. A paper on the subject was published online in Geophysical Research Letters and featured in the Jan. 28 edition of the American Geophysical Union journal highlights. Authors on the study included Miller, graduate students Rebecca Anderson and Stephen DeVogel of INSTAAR, Jason Briner of the State University of New York at Buffalo and Nathaniel Lifton of the University of Arizona.

Located just west of Greenland, the 196,000 square-mile Baffin Island is the fifth largest island in the world. Most of it lies above the Arctic Circle.

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Baffin_Island_Ice_Caps_Shrink_By_50_Percent_Since_1950S_999.html

[Igel]

1. I've seen a couple of different reports saying that

the ice cover at location X is back to or less than it was 1k-2k years ago, and evidence that this is due to global warming.

My question in both cases was, What caused the ice cover to be as it was 1k-2k years ago? In this particular case, what caused the northern Baffin Island ice cap to decrease to the apparently perilous state 1600 years ago?

(And, on a more profesional note, what climatic change happened 1600 years or so ago to reverse it? It's about the time that the Great Migration kicked off.)