Deep valleys buried under the seafloor of the North Sea record how the ancient ice sheets that used to cover the UK and Europe expelled water to stop themselves from collapsing.
A new study published this week (Wednesday 5 October) has surprised the research team, who discovered that the valleys took just hundreds of years to form as they transported vast amounts of meltwater away from under the ice and out into the sea. This new understanding of when the vast ice sheets melted 20,000 years ago has implications for how glaciers may respond to climate warming today. The results are published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
Tunnel valleys are enormous channels, sometimes up to 150km long, 6km wide and 500m deep (each several times larger than Loch Ness), that drain water from beneath melting ice sheets. There are thousands buried beneath the seafloor of the North Sea that record the melting of ice sheets that have covered the UK and Western Europe over the last two million years.
Read more at British Antarctic Survey
Image: This study enables scientists to understand ice sheet melting processes in order to predict what may happen to the polar ice sheets in the future. (Credit_Huw Griffiths @ BAS)