A new picture of the last ice age

Eurasian ice sheets. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Bergen

At the peak of the last ice age, a vast ice sheet covered northern Europe, spanning from the British Isles, across Scandinavia and into Russia in the east and the Barents Sea in the north. A new reconstruction of this ice sheet shows the interaction between climate and glaciers -- how the ice sheet grows and retreats

University of Bergen. "It has been several years of painstaking research. We have gone through all the existing literature from the last 50 years and it has been a lot of work to compile and assimilate the accumulated data," says Anna Hughes, geologist at the University of Bergen and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research.

Hughes and her colleagues at the Department of Earth Science have since 2005 compiled and evaluated published dates and geological observations relevant to reconstruct the growth and retreat of ice during the last ice age. The new compilation of more than 5000 dates spans an area from the continental shelf west of Ireland and onto the Russian Plain in the east. The result is the first version of the database DATED (DATabase of Eurasian Deglaciation), now available for the scientific community at the Pangaea data publisher web site. [...] ScienceDaily