Retreat History of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Marie Byrd Land

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9909778StoneThis award is for support for two years of funding to reconstruct the retreat history of the West Antarctic ice sheet along a flowline through the Ford Ranges in Marie Byrd Land, from the last glacial maximum to present. The ice surface elevation history of the region will be reconstructed by cosmogenic isotope exposure dating of moraine boulders and ice-abraded bedrock surfaces in the Clark, Allegheny and Sarnoff Mountains. Altitude transects will date the thinning of the ice sheet at each of these three sites, where the present ice surface stands at ~1200 m, ~800 m and 200-400 m respectively. This research will produce a deglaciation chronology for Marie Byrd Land capable of resolving competing models of ice sheet retreat and will provide a data set for testing numerical models of the West Antarctic ice sheet through the glacial cycle. In addition, the results will help constrain the past ice load in West Antarctica and therefore help to predict the effect of glacioisostatic motion on geodetic surveys being carried out in the region.