Guest Editorial: Unravelling the history of climate change

Abstract

The spatial configuration of the Antarctic ice sheet has fluctuated widely during the Late Quaternary, primarily in response to climate and sea-level forcings. Ice core time-series have long been used as proxy climate records for the Antarctic ice sheet surface and polar atmosphere, and there has been a major multinational effort to drill ice cores on or near the summit of ice domes to retrieve the longest possible records. The annual layering of ice accumulation has afforded high resolution proxy climate records on annual to decadal intervals, spanning a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of years. These time-series have also detailed the changes in the ice sheet surface elevation and dyn..