Welcome. Here you will find information about our latest funded NSF Arctic System Science Program project to investigate whether meltwater from the Arctic could have triggered the Younger Dryas cold episode ~13,000 years ago. This exciting project combines surveying, sediment coring, and numerical modeling to investigate the origin of the Younger Dryas climate cooling.

The PIs on this project include: Alan Condron (UMass Amherst), Lloyd Keigwin (WHOI) and Neal Driscoll (Scripps).

The above figure shows the propogation of a meltwater flood from the Mackenzie river in the ocean when modeled at 18-km spatial resolution using MITgcm. Blue colors indicate that the water is very fresh. The freshwater turns to the right due to the Coriolis force and hugs the coast as a narrow buoyant coastal current. Sediment cores are being taken from the Mackenzie trough this summer to try and find evidence for this flood