During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ~21,000 years ago), the Laurentide ice sheet covered large parts of North America – reaching an ice thickness of more than 3 km, before it finally melted at the end of the ice age. To date, there have been few detailed studies of the evolution of the North American ice sheet into the LGM. In a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have used a newly developed climate-ice model to draw conclusions about its spatial expansion. They discovered that in particular the snowfall in summer favoured the growth of the ice sheet and influenced the sea level.
Rapid growth of land ice due to summer snowfall
