Studies of the Antarctic and Present-Day Concepts of Global Glaciation

Abstract

Antarctic researches of the last decades have provided new facts which have made scientists change their ideas. The researches have shown a great difference between the history of the Antarctic and the northern hemisphere glaciation. The former is very old and stable, while the latter was ephemeral. An analogous one to the Antarctic ice sheet in the northern hemisphere is the Greenland inland ice. Both ice sheets are of continental-insular type; the Pleistocene ice sheets were of continental type proper. Icethickness measurements showed the topography of the bed under Antarctic ice and revealed a special type of ice sheet lying partly on the sea-floor: the West Antarctic continental-marine ice sheet. Such ice sheets could exist in the northern hemisphere too. They were especially unstable and their formation and destruction could serve as a triggering mechanism in alternating glacials and interglacials. The main concept is: all the great climatic variations during the Pleistocene were glacioclimatic ones where the feedback mechanism was the most important factor. But there are many details which are uncertain. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are the key regions to research so that problems of glacioclimatology could be solved.