Science applications

The whole point of the ICE-D project is to enable synoptic applications of large amounts of cosmogenic-nuclide data. Here are some examples.

ICE-D:ANTARCTICA

Antarctic deglaciation in one figure: a blog posting by Greg Balco that summarizes Holocene exposure-age data from Antarctica to highlight the fact that nearly all LGM-to-present ice sheet thinning in Antarctica appears to have taken place in only a few thousand years in the early to middle Holocene.

A paper by David Small and several others also makes use of an early version of the database to estimate past ice sheet thinning rates at various places in Antarctica.

Almost nothing has happened in interior Antarctica since the mid-Miocene: a paper by Perry Spector that uses the ICE-D:ANTARCTICA database to show that the geomorphic record in interior Antarctica extends up to but not past the dramatic climate cooling that established the polar desert climate regime 14 million years ago.

Find the Gap! A paper by Joanne Johnson and many others uses the ICE-D:ANTARCTICA database to explore evidence for Holocene retreat and readvance of Antarctic ice sheet grounding lines. See Figure 2 in the paper. There is more back story about the figure in a blog posting.

A synoptic view of Antarctic ice sheet change in the Holocene: A paper by Richard Jones and others in Nature Reviews uses the ICE-D database to understand the Antarctic contribution to Holocene sea level change.

Antarctic ice sheet model benchmarking: A paper by Benoit Lecavalier and others in Earth System Science Data uses the ICE-D:ANTARCTICA database as part of an observational constraint database intended for benchmarking LGM-to-present ice sheet model simulations.

ICE-D:ALPINE

Were there any Younger Dryas glacier advances in the American cordillera?: an EGU 2021 presentation that tries to explain how to implement error-tolerant paleoclimate hypothesis testing with a large data set of exposure ages on alpine glacier moraines.

Spatio-temporal patterns of Late Pleistocene mountain glaciation in the western United States: A GSA presentation demonstrating the use of ICE-D Alpine for a simple analysis of terminal and recessional moraine exposure ages and corresponding ELAs in the conterminous western U.S.

A paper in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences uses the ICE-D:ALPINE database to show how one might learn about synoptic paleoclimate from large data sets of cosmogenic-nuclide exposure ages on alpine glacier moraines.

Late Pleistocene mountain glacier equilibrium line altitudes in the Great Basin and neighboring settings in the southwestern U.S.A.: A GSA presentation demonstrating the combination of ICE-D Alpine exposure ages of moraines with a set of geospatial tools for 3D reconstructions of mountain glacier surfaces and ELAs.

Local summer insolation and greenhouse gas forcing drove warming and glacier retreat in New Zealand during the Holocene: A paper by Lisa Dowling and others in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews that uses data from ICE-D:ALPINE with global climate model simulations for a synoptic view of Holocene climate change in New Zealand. Especially see Figure 6.

ICE-D:CALIBRATION

What exactly is the Al-26/Be-10 production ratio anyway? An article in Geosciences by Chris Halsted that exploits a large number of paired-nuclide measurements from simply-exposed samples in the ICE-D:ALPINE and ICE-D:CALIBRATION databases to show that this parameter is probably a lot better constrained than we thought it was. Also see this.

The CREp online exposure age calculator: CREp uses the ICE-D:CALIBRATION database to provide highly configurable production rate calibration data for exposure-dating applications.