Researchers from Newcastle, Cambridge and Loughborough universities used high-resolution imagery of the seafloor to reveal the speed at which a former ice sheet that extended from Norway retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, about 20,000 years ago.
The team mapped more than 7,600 small-scale landforms called ‘corrugation ridges’ across the seafloor which are understood to have formed when the ice sheet’s retreating margin moved up and down with the tides.
Given that two ridges would have been produced each day under two tidal cycles, the researchers were able to calculate how quickly the ice sheet retreated.
Their results show the former ice sheet underwent pulses of rapid retreat at a speed of 50 to 600 metres per day – much faster than any ice sheet retreat rate that has been observed from satellites or inferred from similar landforms in Antarctica.
“Our research provides a warning from the past about the speeds that ice sheets are physically capable...