Robert M. DeConto

TL;DR: A model coupling ice sheet and climate dynamics—including previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs—is calibrated against Pliocene and Last Interglacial sea-level estimates and applied to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

TL;DR: In this simulation, declining Cenozoic CO2 first leads to the formation of small, highly dynamic ice caps on high Antarctic plateaux, and at a later time, a CO2 threshold is crossed, initiating ice-sheet height/mass-balance feedbacks that cause the ice caps to expand rapidly with large orbital variations, eventually coalescing into a continental-scale East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

TL;DR: A combined ice sheet/ice shelf model capable of high-resolution nesting with a new treatment of grounding-line dynamics and ice-shelf buttressing is used to simulate Antarctic ice sheet variations over the past five million years, indicating a long-term trend from more frequently collapsed to more glaciated states.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors report proxy records of sea surface temperatures from multiple ocean localities and show that the high-latitude temperature decrease was substantial and heterogeneous, and that Northern Hemisphere glaciation was not required to accommodate the magnitude of continental ice growth during this time.

TL;DR: A marine glacial record from the upper 600 m of the AND-1B sediment core recovered from beneath the northwest part of the Ross ice shelf is presented and well-dated, ∼40-kyr cyclic variations in ice-sheet extent linked to cycles in insolation influenced by changes in the Earth’s axial tilt (obliquity) during the Pliocene are demonstrated.