Late Pleistocene Inland West Antarctic Ice Sheet Elevations at Mt. Takahe

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9725910 McIntosh This award is for support for a project to establish a detailed record of volcanism at Mt. Takahe volcano in Marie Byrd Land that will provide absolute age and elevation data on inland paleo-ice levels on the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) during the most recent glacial cycle. Previous work at Mt. Takahe documented volcanic deposits located on the lower flanks that were erupted beneath, at, or above the level of the WAIS. These deposits have been dated to between 104,000 and 7,000 years before present and suggest that the inland WAIS was much higher during the last glacial cycle than it is today. The inland paleo-ice level can be used to test conflicting hypotheses about the configuration of the WAIS in late Wisconsin time and the role of WAIS retreat in global sea level rise. Well constrained limits on inland paleo-ice-levels during the past 100,000 years can be compared with global records of climate change in order to assess the relationship between the WAIS and the climate system. Finally, precisely dated paleo-ice- levels can be used as "hard" input data for numerical models of ice sheet dynamics.