Collapse of polar ice sheets during the stage 11 interglacial

The magnitude of sea level rise during marine isotope stage 11 (about 400,000 years ago) is shown to have been probably only 6 to 13 metres, in contrast to some earlier estimates of up to 20 metres. Stability of the East Antarctic ice The ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica are known to be susceptible to climate warming, and both are losing mass. How the East Antarctic Ice Sheet will respond to warming is less clear. Recent evidence from shoreline features in Bermuda and the Bahamas suggested that during marine isotope stage 11 — a period of warming that occurred about 400,000 years ago — the sea level was 20 metres higher than it is today, which pointed to significant melting of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Now, an estimate that takes into account post-glacial crustal subsidence of the shoreline sites during an anomalously long interglacial period puts the sea level during stage 11 at 6–13 metres higher than today. That can be explained by the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, with only a small contribution from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Contentious observations of Pleistocene shoreline features on the tectonically stable islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas have suggested that sea level about 400,000 years ago was more than 20 metres higher than it is today 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . Geochronologic and geomorphic evidence indicates that these features formed during interglacial marine isotope stage (MIS) 11, an unusually long interval of warmth during the ice age 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . Previous work has advanced two divergent hypotheses for these shoreline features: first, significant melting of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, in addition to the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Sheet 1 , 2 , 3 ; or second, emplacement by a mega-tsunami during MIS 11 (ref. 4 , 5 ). Here we show that the elevations of these features are corrected downwards by ∼10 metres when we account for post-glacial crustal subsidence of these sites over the course of the anomalously long interglacial. On the basis of this correction, we estimate that eustatic sea level rose to ∼6–13 m above the present-day value in the second half of MIS 11. This suggests that both the Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed during the protracted warm period while changes in the volume of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet were relatively minor, thereby resolving the long-standing controversy over the stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet