Joan J. Fitzpatrick

TL;DR: In this article, the history of Arctic sea-ice conditions through the geologic past is investigated using proxy records from the Arctic Ocean floor and from the surrounding coasts, which indicate that sea ice became a feature of the Arctic by 47-Ma, following a pronounced decline in atmospheric pCO2 after the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Optimum, and consistently covered at least part of the arctic Ocean for no less than the last 13-14 million years.

TL;DR: A north-to-south directionality of the abrupt climatic signal is demonstrated, which is propagated to the Southern Hemisphere high latitudes by oceanic rather than atmospheric processes, which confirms a central role for ocean circulation in the bipolar seesaw.

TL;DR: Results from a new, annually resolved ice-core record from West Antarctica suggest a more active role for the Southern Ocean in the onset of deglaciation than is inferred from ice cores in the East Antarctic interior, which are largely isolated from sea-ice changes.

TL;DR: The authors provide an overview of the evolution of climate from the hot house of the early Cenozoic through its transition to the ice-house of the Quaternary, with a special emphasis on the anomalous warmth of the middle Pliocene, early quaternary warm times, the Mid Pleistocene transition, warm interglaciations of marine isotope stages 11, 5e, and 1, the stage 3 interstadial, and the peak cold of the last glacial maximum.

TL;DR: For example, the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GIP2) as mentioned in this paper has been used to date the Greenland ice core from central Greenland, allowing rapid dating of the core, and it has been observed that changes in bubble and grain structure caused by near-surface, primarily summertime formation of hoar complexes provide the main visible annual marker in the Holocene, and changes in “cloudiness of the ice correlated with dustiness mark Wisconsinan annual cycles; both markers are evident and have been intercalibrated in early Holocene ice.