Paleoglaciological reconstructions for the Tibetan Plateau during the last glacial cycle

Nina Kirchner

The Tibetan Plateau is a topographic feature of extraordinary dimension and has an important impact on regional and global climate. However, the glacial history of the Tibetan Plateau is more poorly constrained than that of most other formerly glaciated regions such as in North America and Eurasia. On the basis of some field evidence it has been hypothesized that the Tibetan Plateau was covered by an ice sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Abundant field- and chronological evidence for a predominance of local valley glaciation during the past 300,000 calendar years (that is, 300 ka), coupled to an absence of glacial landforms and sediments in extensive areas of the plateau, now refute this concept. This, furthermore, calls into question previous ice sheet modeling attempts which generally arrive at ice volumes considerably larger than allowed for by field evidence. Surprisingly, the robustness of such numerical ice sheet model results has not been widely queried, despite potentially important climate ramifications.

References

Kirchner, N., Greve, R., Stroeven, A., Heyman, J., (2011). Paleoglaciological reconstructions for the Tibetan Plateau during the last glacial cycle: evaluating numerical ice sheet simulations driven by GCM-ensembles In: Quaternary Science Reviews 30, pp. 248–267., DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.11.006