Antarctic Ice Sheet behaviour

The ice sheets covering Antarctica hold enough ice to raise sea level by >50 m (were it all to melt) and are in themselves a major component of Earth's climate. My experience in Antarctica began as my MSc thesis project (Reedy Glacier) and continued via PhD work at Scott Glacier, postdoc work at Beardmore Glacier, and our collaborative NSF-funded project in the central Transantarctic Mountains. The latter sought to establish how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) responds to climate warming, by reconstructing its behaviour during past warm periods, and deliver new terrestrial calibrations for models simulating future change, data that until now have been scarce from the Antarctic continent itself. 

All of my Antarctic work utilises the terrestrial geologic record of past changes in ice sheet volume, specifically the moraines deposited by the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets along the flanks of the Transantarctic Mountains. And these data sets can span millions of years! For instance, our most recent project delivered a 15 million-year record of EAIS fluctuations from Otway Massif and Roberts Massif, revealing no real response (to my eye) to the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period but a tantalising gap in deposition during the middle Miocene. This work also provided new constraint on the ridiculously low rock erosion rates (< 5 mm per million years) typical of these high polar desert landscapes and, as detailed in Greg Balco's blog, we "analysed the sample with the highest concentration of in-situ-produced cosmogenic helium-3 ever observed in a terrestrial rock". And if that doesn't deserve a blog post, what does?

Collaborators: Brenda Hall (Umaine), Greg Balco (Berkeley Geochronology Center), Margaret Jackson (Trinity College Dublin), John Stone & Howard Conway (University of Washington), Maurice Conway (University of Life)

Students/Postdocs/RAs: Allie Balter-Kennedy & Holly Thomas (UMaine), Claire Todd, Seth Cowdery, & Perry Spector (University of Washington), Nathan Mietkiewicz (UMaine)

Funded by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, OPP, including grants 0636818 and 0838818, 1443321 (Bromley) and 1443329 (Balco), 0636687, and 0229314

Related Publications 

Bromley, G.R., Balco, G., Jackson, M.S., Balter-Kennedy, A. and Thomas, H., 2025. East Antarctic Ice Sheet variability in the central Transantarctic Mountains since the mid Miocene. Climate of the Past 21, 145–160

Balter-Kennedy, A., Bromley, G., et al., 2020. A 14.5-million-year record of East Antarctic Ice Sheet fluctuations from the central Transantarctic Mountains, constrained with cosmogenic 3He, 10Be, 21Ne, and 26Al. The Cryosphere 14, 2647-2672

Spector, P., Stone, J., Cowdery, S.G., Hall, B., Conway, H., Bromley, G., 2017. Rapid early‐Holocene deglaciation in the Ross Sea, Antarctica. Geophysical Research Letters 44, 7817–7825 

Hall, B., Bromley, G., Stone, J. and Conway, H., 2017. Holocene ice recession at Polygon Spur, Reedy Glacier, Antarctica. The Holocene 27, 122–129.

Bromley, G.R.M., et al., 2012. Late Pleistocene evolution of Scott Glacier, southern Transantarctic Mountains: Implications for the Antarctic contribution to deglacial sea level. Quat. Sci. Rev. 50, 1-13

Bromley, G.R.M., et al., 2010. Late Cenozoic deposits at Reedy Glacier, Transantarctic Mountains: implications for former thickness of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Quat. Sci. Rev. 29, 384-398 

Todd, C.E., Stone, J.O., Conway, H., Hall, B.L., Bromley, G.R.M., 2010. Late-Quaternary evolution of Reedy Glacier. Quaternary Science Reviews 29, 1328-1341. 

What happens in Antarctic does not stay in Antarctica (UMaine College of Earth, Life & Health Sciences)

Ancient Moraines: A field season in the Antarctic (field blog by Allie Balter-Kenned)