Collapse of European Ice Sheet Revealed

Researchers have now reconstructed the collapse of the European ice sheet at the end of the last ice age in detail. The big melt caused a lot of havoc across the European continent.

The Eurasian ice sheet was a big storehouse of ice covering most of North Europe around 23,000 years ago. The uninformed flooding led to a dramatic sea- level rise and diverted the course of all the mega rivers coming into its way. An investigating model of the collapse and its impacts has just been published in the Quaternary Science reviews.

The collapse caused the ice sheet to lose 750 cubic kilometers of ice a year and sometimes the figure would reach up to 3000 cubic kilometers. Calculations reveal that the breakdown contributed around 2.5 meters to global sea level rise on an estimate.

Britain and Ireland, which had been joined to Europe during the last ice age finally parted ways with the flooding of the English Channel around 10,000 years ago. 

Content: www.sciencedaily.com