@article{ee03774478184df58396ce4aed5f1a85,
title = "Abrupt Common Era hydroclimate shifts drive west Greenland ice cap change",
abstract = "Ice core archives are well suited for reconstructing rapid past climate changes at high latitudes. Despite this, few records currently exist from coastal Greenlandic ice caps due to their remote nature, limiting our long-term understanding of past maritime and coastal climate variability across this rapidly changing Arctic region. Here, we reconstruct regionally representative glacier surface mass balance and climate variability over the last two thousand years (~169–2015 ce) using an ice core collected from the Nuussuaq Peninsula, west Greenland. We find indications of abrupt regional hydroclimate shifts, including an up to 20% decrease in average snow accumulation during the transition from the Medieval Warm Period (950–1250 ce) to Little Ice Age (1450–1850 ce), followed by a subsequent >40% accumulation increase from the early 18th to late 20th centuries ce. These coastal changes are substantially larger than those previously reported from interior Greenland records. Moreover, we show that the strong relationship observed today between Arctic temperature rise and coastal ice cap decay contrasts with that of the last millennium, during which periods of warming led to snowfall-driven glacial growth. Taken together with modern observations, the ice core evidence could indicate a recent reversal in the response of west Greenland ice caps to climate change.",
author = "Osman, {Matthew B.} and Smith, {Benjamin E.} and Trusel, {Luke D.} and Das, {Sarah B.} and McConnell, {Joseph R.} and Nathan Chellman and Monica Arienzo and Harald Sodemann",
note = "Funding Information: Funding for retrieval and analysis of the NU ice core was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Arctic System Science Program award OPP-1205196 to S.B.D. and ARC-1205062 to B.E.S. Geospatial support for this work was provided by the Polar Geospatial Center under NSF-OPP awards 1043681 and 1559691. M.B.O. acknowledges support from the US Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship and an Ocean Outlook Fellowship to the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research. L.D.T. acknowledges support from the NSF (grant no. 2021699). H.S. acknowledges support from UNINETT Sigma2 (the National Infrastructure for High Performance Computing and Data Storage in Norway; grant no. NS9054K) and the Norwegian Research Council (grant no. 262710). We thank IDDO and IDPO and M. Waszkiewicz for assistance with ice coring equipment and drilling, Polar Field Services for field support and Air Greenland for air support. We thank the students and staff of the DRI ice core group for laboratory assistance; T.J. Fudge for assistance with electrical conductivity measurements and the NSF Ice Core Facility, A. York, M. Bingham and M. Hatch for Nuussuaq ice core sampling, processing and analysis support. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.",
year = "2021",
month = oct,
doi = "10.1038/s41561-021-00818-w",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "14",
pages = "756--761",
journal = "Nature Geoscience",
issn = "1752-0894",
publisher = "Nature Publishing Group",
number = "10",
}