Robert Mulvaney Summary

In the article, “Recent Antarctic Peninsula warming relative to Holocene climate and ice-shelf history,” Robert Mulvaney and several scientists discussed the climate history of the Antarctic Peninsula and its relationship to the collapsing ice shelves. They observed that the ice shelves were collapsing which allowed the glaciers to drain ice at a faster rate. The ice shelves that collapsed were at the Antarctic Peninsula which has had the most rapid warming over the past 50 years. Mulvaney and other scientists that worked along with him saw the importance of figuring out the stability of the ice shelves. They hypothesized that the past warming had increased the instability of the ice shelves. Their first goal was to try figure out the past climate change of the area. After figuring out the climate change, it can be compared to the time that the ice shelves had collapsed and reformed. Finding the relationship between the two variables will show the …show more content…
This model was called the glaciological flow model. This model shows how the snow flowed and spread out as snow piled on. The deeper the layer is, the thinner the layer becomes because it was compressed more. This model gave the scientists an idea of the age of the layer of ice. The model was not perfect, they had to fix the model. They looked for particles from eruptions which were called tephra. The date of the eruption had already been determined so therefore, when tephra appeared in the layer scientists knew the date of the ice layer. The large changes in of the ratios of hydrogen to deuterium in the ice shows that something is missing in the model, for an example a glacial event. They took that into account and changed the model to try fill in the blanks. They also took that idea and showed that they realized that there is a possible difference in their data and what actually