Clues regarding the development of massive ice layers in Antarctica have been uncovered in mud samples taken from Mississippi, shedding light on a major climate cooling event often referred to as the Grande Coupure or 'great cut.' A recent study in Nature Communications, led by researchers from
, examined material taken from cores drilled near Jackson, Mississippi in the USA.
While the initial formation of those ice caps, and the beginning of the modern, colder climate of the past 34 million years was due to long-term burial, or sequestering of carbon in sediments; the team found that the falling sea levels led to a 300,000-year break on climate cooling. “We’ve unearthed information from the Mississippi mud to answer a key question about how Antarctic ice massively expanded to continental scale.
“This solves a puzzle about the timeline of the transition and suggests that the beginnings of this event and the build-up of Antarctic ice sheets started some 300,000 years earlier. Once the brake of organic carbon was used up, the transition was freed to continue its move to the colder state of the past 34 million years.”
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