A new climate model suggests that icebergs once drifted in the waters of South Carolina and Southern Florida during the last Ice Age.
Oceanographer Alan Condron from the University of Massachusetts Amherst developed a high-resolution climate model to create a description of the circulation of the oceans roughly 21,000 years ago.
The study provided a demonstration of the environment when a large ice sheet used to cover North America. The ice sheet used in the model is called the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a massive ice sheet that stretch millions of square miles covering most of Canada and some parts of the United States 20,000 years ago. When the ice started to melt, the icebergs reached the sea of Hudson Bay in Canada. From there, the huge chunks of ice drifted to the U.S. East Coast until it reached the Bahamas and Miami in Florida.
"Determining how far south of the sub-polar icebergs and meltwater penetrated gyre is vital for understanding the sensitivity of North Atlantic Deep Water formation and climate to past changes in high-latitude freshwater runoff," Condron said in a statement.
Study co-author Jenna Hill of Coastal Carolina University also looked at the high-resolution photographs of Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Florida. She found 400 scour marks left by icebergs that bumped against the sea floor as they drifted towards the shore. The scours suggested that the icebergs during the time had a thickness of 1,000 feet.
The researchers then made a simulation model of the meltwater produced by the glaciers to track the path of the icebergs the point of origin to Florida. It suggested that the Laurentide Ice Sheet might have melted immensely resulting to outburst of meltwater that pushed the icebergs from either the Hudson Bay or the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The results of the study also implied how icebergs contributed in the changes of the Earth's landscape. The areas with iceberg scours have rich marine resources.
"I have wondered if these corals were living there when the icebergs came through or if the iceberg scour grooves have helped shape the habitat in some way," Hill told Live Science.
Further details of the study were published in the Oct. 12 issue of Nature Geosciences.
