Why is glacial research relevant to climate change?

Ice sheets as analogues
Current worries about climate change mean that investigations of past ice sheets have become increasingly important. Past glaciations can be compared to modern polar ice caps, and can put recent changes in polar ice sheet dynamics (e.g. ice shelf loss, and acceleration of polar ice flow rates) into a long-term context. By using past glaciations as analogues, we can increase our ability to predict future ice-ocean-atmosphere interactions. We can look at past ice shelf collapses, for example, to see what the recent collapse of the Larsen ice shelf is likely to mean for the glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula.


Modelling ice sheets
By using models of past ice sheets (like Alun Hubbard, Aberystwyth), which can be tightly constrained by geological data (such as the BRITICE project, which aims to summarise all the geological data available on the last British ice sheet), we can increase our confidence in these mathematical models and apply them to the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, better predicting future ice melt and resulting sea level rise.


Subglacial Processes
It is obviously very difficult to access the subglacial environment. Although some people are trying it (like Doug Benn), it is logistically diffcult, expensive, and dangerous. You can bury probes like Jane Hart, but again, you only get a very limited understanding of subglacial processes. However, by conducting detailed sedimentological investigations of glacial sediments left behind after an ice sheet has retreated, you can make numerous inferences about the subglacial environment. This generates data that can be used effectively to feed into glaciological models and that can be applied to modern ice caps, aiding our understanding of current rapid retreat and thinning of polar ice streams (like Jakobshavn, Greenland). I used detailed sedimentary analysis of sediments in Durham to understand what went on at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum in eastern England.



Sea Level Uncertainty
A large part of the uncertainty of future sea level (see the graph, taken from the IPCC) rise comes from uncertainty in ice dynamical processes. This was highlighted by the IPCC as a top research priority. Most of the predicted rise in sea level over the next 100 years comes from surface melting. However, marine-terminating ice streams in Greenland (that is, fast flowing sectors of the Greenland Ice Sheet that end in the ocean) have recently experienced rapid thinning and acceleration, losing mass to the North Atlantic. We have little understanding of the processes operating in these ice streams, so it is important to study past ice sheets, putting these short-term events into a longer term context and improving our understanding of dynamical ice sheet processes. Antarctica has had a long history of research.


Antarctic Research
The Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctic ice sheets, in particular, are vulnerable to sea level rise, atmospheric and oceanic warming, and could result in catastrophic and rapid sea level rise over the next few hundred years. The recent loss of the Larsen Ice Shelf and resulting increase in velocity and draw down of rapid outlet glaciers in the region, suggests that this process could even be beginning now. The Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, in West Antarctica, are currently thinning and experiencing very rapid flow. In light of this, a longer-term understanding of Antarctic ice sheet dynamics is ever more important.

See this image from the USGS to see where the Antarctic Peninsula is.