By Steve Drury PUBLISHED ON March 28, 2021

Just over a month since evidence emerged that the Arctic Ocean was probably filled with fresh water from 150 to 131 and 70 to 62 thousand years ago (When the Arctic Ocean was filled with fresh water, February 2021), another study has shaken ‘received wisdom’ about Arctic conditions. This time it is about the climate in polar regions, and comes not from an ice core but speleothem or calcium carbonate flowstone that was precipitated on a cave wall in north-eastern Greenland.

The existence of caves at about 80°N between 350 to 670 m above sea level in a very cold, arid area is a surprise in itself, for they require flowing water to form. The speleothem is up to 12 cm thick, but none is growing under modern, relatively warm conditions, cave air being below freezing all year. For speleothem to form to such an extent suggests a long period when air temperature was above 0°C. So was it precipitated before glacial conditions were established in pre-Pleistocene times?

A standard means of discovering the age of cave deposits, such as speleothem or stalagmites, is uranium-series dating (see: Irish stalagmite reveals high-frequency climate changes, December 2001).

In this case the sheet of flowstone turned out to have been deposited between 588 to 537 thousand years ago; a 50 ka ‘window’ into conditions that prevailed during the middle part of 100 ka climatic cycling – about 6 glacial-interglacial stages before present. (Moseley, G.E. et al. 2021. Speleothem record of mild and wet mid-Pleistocene climate in northeast Greenland. Science Advances, v. 7, online article  eabe1260; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe1260).

Roughly half the layer formed during an interglacial, the rest under glacial conditions that followed. Detailed oxygen-isotope studies revealed that air temperatures during which calcium carbonate was precipitated were at least 3.5°C above those prevailing in the area at present; warm enough to melt local permafrost and to increase the summer extent of ice-free conditions in the Arctic Ocean, thereby encouraging greater rainfall. These warm and wet conditions correlate with increased solar heating over the North Atlantic region at that time, as suggested by modelling based on Milankovich astronomical forcing.

Unfortunately, the climate record derived from cores through the Greenland ice sheet only reaches back to about 120 ka, during the last interglacial period. So it is not possible to match the speleothem results to an alternative data set. Yet, thanks to the rediscovery of dirt cored from the very base of the deepest part of the ice sheet (beneath Camp Century) in a freezer in Denmark – it was discarded as interest focused on the record preserved in the ice itself – there is now evidence for complete melting of the ice sheet at some time in the past. The dirt contains abundant fossil plants. Analysing radioactive isotopes of aluminium and beryllium that formed in associated quartz grains as a result of cosmic ray bombardment when the area was ice-free suggests two periods of complete melting followed by glaciation , the second  being within the last million years.

The onshore Arctic climate is clearly more unstable than previously believed.

See also:  Geologists Find Million-Year-Old Plant Fossils Deep Beneath Greenland Ice Sheet. Sci News, 16 March 2021.

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Many thanks to Steve Drury for permission to republish his article and to Bernie Bell for sending it to The Orkney News

Related story: When the Arctic Ocean was filled with fresh water