Popsicle Earth
At the height of the last ice age, the Earth was dramatically more covered with ice than scientists previously believed, and while much of that ice has melted, Harvard researchers say relatively little of the melting occurred in Antarctica. As described in a paper recently published in Nature Geoscience, Jacqueline Austermann, a Harvard graduate student working in the lab of geophysics Professor Jerry Mitrovica, developed a new, more accurate model of what the Earth looked like during the last ice age and found that more ice — enough to equal the present Greenland ice sheet — then covered the globe. As the climate warmed, most of that melted. But while popular opinion may hold that the Antarctic ice area is far smaller than it was long ago, Natalya Gomez, another graduate student in Mitrovica’s lab, found that melting Antarctic ice contributed less than 10 percent to the change in sea level from...