The glacier in the Queen Maud Land region was actively melting during the Stone Age. This has been reported by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Sixty percent of the world’s fresh water is concentrated in the Antarctic ice sheets. That’s about 30 million cubic meters of ice, and if it melts, the sea level will rise 58 meters. Today, the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking due to climate warming, and scientists are concerned about the possible consequences.
Now Irina Rogozhina and her colleagues have discovered ice in Queen Maud Land in East Antarctica. The results show that this sector of the ice sheet has changed a lot over time and has recently melted considerably. This happened after the end of the last ice age, when large ice sheets covered North America, northern Europe, and southern South America. When these ice sheets melted, they raised sea levels by more than 100 meters.
“Based on the data we presented in our study, we conclude that the East Antarctic ice sheet in Dronning Maud Land melted rapidly in the middle of the Holocene between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago. Summers in many parts of the world at that time were warmer than they are now,” said Rogozhina.
These conclusions were made based on the analysis of the surface of Antarctic rocks. Under the influence of cosmic rays, their surface changes, and ice protects against them. In this way, it is possible to restore the periods when the stones were outdoors. At the same time, the reasons for the melting of ice in the middle of the Holocene are not clear to scientists.