New Discovery Sheds Light on Ancient Baffin Bay Ice Shelf

Associate Professor Shannon Klotsko, Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, is the lead author of a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience, focusing on her team’s discovery of a new feature on the seafloor that points to an ancient ice shelf that existed in Baffin Bay during the last ice age. 

See the Article in Nature Geoscience: The Baffin Bay Ice Shelf stabilized three adjacent ice sheets during the last glacial period

Baffin Bay, located between Greenland and Canada, was once home to an expansive ice shelf that researchers estimate covered approximately 150,000 square kilometers. The Baffin Bay Ice Shelf was between 1,400 and 2,100 meters thick, making it thicker than modern Antarctic ice shelves.

Researchers compiled seafloor bathymetric data and studied features along the Baffin Bay continental slope to determine the extent and maximum depth of the ancient ice shelf. Their findings indicate the ice shelf helped stabilize and promote the thickening of the Laurentide, Innuitian and Greenland ice sheets, which came together in Baffin Bay during the last ice age.

“We didn’t set out to find an ice shelf this thick when we embarked on the research cruise for our project, the Baffin Bay Deglacial Experiment, so finding these imprints of ice on the seafloor at such great depths was a huge surprise,” said Klotsko.

The team also found evidence that the collapse of the Baffin Bay Ice Shelf triggered rapid retreat of the surrounding ice sheets. The findings show how the loss of an ice shelf can quickly reorganize marine ice sheets and may offer a comparison for how weakening ice shelves could affect future ice sheet retreat in Antarctica.

“Modern ice shelves help prevent Antarctic ice sheets from rapidly draining into the ocean, which would cause significant global sea level rise, so finding one of a similar size in the past that disappeared in 500–1,000 years is a bit scary when thinking about the future of our coasts,” Klotsko said.

The research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant and included Klotsko’s Applied Coastal and Ocean Sciences doctoral student, Erin Gregory, and collaborators from the University of Florida, Columbia University, University of Colorado Boulder, Queen’s University Belfast, Oregon State University and the University of Washington.