The research, led by Jonathan Adams of Imperial College London and the British Antarctic Survey with colleagues including Dylan Rood, Klaus Wilcken, Stephen Roberts, and Joanne Johnson, hinges on a technique called cosmogenic nuclide surface exposure dating. The principle is elegantly simple. When cosmic rays strike rock at the Earth’s surface, they shatter atoms in the mineral quartz and forge rare isotopes such as beryllium-10 and carbon-14. The longer a rock sits exposed to the sky, the more of these cosmogenic nuclides accumulate. Measure their concentrations, and you can calculate how long ago the ice melted away and the rock first saw daylight. For ice sheet scientists, these ages are the ground truth against which computer models of past and future retreat are validated.

But the two isotopes behave very differently, and that difference is the heart of the study. Beryllium-10 has a half-life of 1.387 million years, so it accumulates essentially forever and lingers through multiple cycles of burial and re-exposure. In Antarctica, where cold-based ice often freezes to the bed without eroding it, rocks can carry inherited beryllium-10 from exposures that happened tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago, long before the last glacial maximum. That inherited signal can make a freshly deglaciated surface look deceptively old. In situ produced carbon-14, by contrast, has a half-life of just 5,700 years. Any carbon-14 built up before the last glacial maximum largely decays away while the rock sits under deep ice, so a surface re-exposed at the end of the ice age carries almost none of this legacy. A rock that was saturated with carbon-14 before the last glacial maximum, buried at 25,000 years ago, and re-exposed at 10,000 years ago would retain a pre-ice-age inventory amounting to only about six percent of what is measured today. That makes carbon-14 uniquely suited to dating the most recent chapter of ice retreat.

Adams and his team collected nine rounded erratic cobbles from three sites on Mount Murphy: the Notebook Cliffs at around 850 to 900 meters above sea level, Turtle Rock between roughly 440 and 700 meters, and a scoria cone near Kay Peak sitting just 180 to 240 meters above the ice, less than a kilometer from the grounding line of Pope Glacier. All nine had previously been dated with beryllium-10, and those ages told a coherent story: the ice surface at Mount Murphy thinned dramatically during the early to mid-Holocene, reaching low elevations by roughly 9,000 to 6,000 years ago. The new carbon-14 measurements, however, told a different tale. Six of the nine samples yielded carbon-14 ages of only 5,000 to 3,000 years, implying the ice lingered thousands of years longer than the beryllium-10 record suggested.

When the two isotopes from the same sample are compared on a paired nuclide diagram, where the beryllium-10 concentration is plotted against the carbon-14 to beryllium-10 ratio, the samples split into two camps. Concordant pairs, in which the two ages agree within uncertainty, indicate a simple exposure history since the ice age. Discordant pairs, where the ages do not overlap, hint at burial, shielding, or shifting production rates. At Mount Murphy, some samples were concordant while others, often at the same elevation, were discordant, and the discordant carbon-14 ages were systematically the younger ones. Stranger still, some high-elevation samples yielded younger ages than low-elevation ones, the exact inverse of the pattern expected as an ice sheet thins upward through time.

The team systematically hunted for a geological explanation. They examined aerial photographs from 1966 showing that the lower scoria cone outcrop was once buried by ice, confirming that at least some samples experienced late Holocene shielding. They tested whether thin layers of till or snow could explain the discrepancies, and whether erratics might have been exposed at higher elevations before being transported downslope, a mechanism invoked at Shark Fin Nunatak near Tucker Glacier. They even modeled scenarios in which subsurface production of carbon-14 by muons, which contributes roughly twenty percent of total carbon-14 production at the surface compared with under two percent for beryllium-10, could inflate the carbon-14 to beryllium-10 ratio in buried samples, producing seemingly impossible nuclide ratios like those seen at Sjögren Glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula. None of these geological scenarios could account for the Mount Murphy pattern.

The breakthrough came from the laboratory rather than the landscape. The researchers had run repeat carbon-14 measurements on four of their samples, and three of those four failed to reproduce within their stated uncertainties. The initial measurements produced ages 5,000 to 3,000 years younger than the replicates, with some replicate ages more than 150 percent older than their first-pass counterparts. Crucially, the older, reproducible ages agreed with the beryllium-10 chronology, while the young, irreproducible ages did not. Sensitivity analyses using different blank corrections and different calibration values for the CRONUS-A reference material could not rescue the young ages, no matter how the numbers were shuffled. The problem, it appeared, lay in the measurements themselves, not in the ice history.

To find out whether this was an isolated glitch, the team turned to the informal cosmogenic-nuclide exposure-age database, ICE-D, and compiled every sample worldwide with replicate carbon-14 measurements, thirty-one in total, spanning the Antarctic Peninsula, the Weddell Sea Embayment, Lake Bonneville in Utah, and the Northwest Highlands of Scotland. The result was sobering: in eighteen of the thirty-one samples, at least one carbon-14 measurement failed to reproduce within the nominal six percent uncertainty conventionally assigned to such data, and fifteen still failed at the more forgiving two-sigma level. Interlaboratory comparisons of CRONUS-A tell a similar story, with long-term average carbon-14 concentrations varying by roughly fifteen percent between extraction facilities, from about 6.12 times ten to the fifth atoms per gram at Tulane University to 7.28 times ten to the fifth at ETH Zurich. The inescapable conclusion is that the analytical uncertainty quoted for in situ carbon-14 is currently underestimated, particularly for the moderate concentrations typical of Holocene-aged samples, where contamination from background carbon in processing blanks becomes dominant.

The good news for Antarctic science is that the accepted deglaciation history of Mount Murphy, and by extension the Amundsen Sea Embayment, survives this scrutiny intact. The concordant, reproducible carbon-14 ages align with the beryllium-10 record, confirming that ice there thinned substantially between about 9,000 and 6,000 years ago, and the team credits access to the Tulane laboratory’s quality control data with preventing them from publishing a badly wrong chronology. The broader lesson is a call to arms for the geochronology community: routinely publish replicate measurements, quantify and minimize scatter in process blanks, and pursue interlaboratory comparison studies with additional reference materials to establish consensus calibration values. As automation of carbon-14 extraction lines increases throughput, these checks become practical. The stakes could hardly be higher. Thwaites Glacier is one of the largest contributors to sea-level rise from Antarctica, and projections of its future depend on models calibrated against the past. If the isotopic clocks that record that past are even slightly miscalibrated, the sub-millennial precision needed to capture phases of retreat and readvance slips out of reach. This study shows both the fragility and the resilience of the method: the clocks can go wrong, but with enough cross-checks, science can catch them before the story gets rewritten.

Subject of Research: Cosmogenic carbon-14 and beryllium-10 exposure dating of Holocene ice sheet thinning at Mount Murphy, West Antarctica

Article Title: Paired 14C–10Be exposure ages from Mount Murphy, West Antarctica: Implications for accurate and precise deglacial chronologies

Article References: Adams, J. R., Rood, D. H., Wilcken, K., Roberts, S. J., & Johnson, J. S. (2026). Paired 14 C– 10 Be exposure ages from Mount Murphy, West Antarctica: Implications for accurate and precise deglacial chronologies. Geochronology, 8(2), 255-277. https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-8-255-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gchron-8-255-2026

Keywords: cosmogenic nuclides, in situ carbon-14, beryllium-10, Mount Murphy, Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica, exposure dating, deglaciation, Holocene, ice sheet thinning, sea-level rise, analytical uncertainty

The physics behind surface-exposure dating is elegant. High-energy cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere shower the Earth’s surface with secondary particles that split atomic nuclei within minerals such as quartz. One product of this spallation is beryllium-10, a rare isotope that accumulates in the top few centimetres of an exposed rock at a known rate. Measure the concentration of beryllium-10 in a glacially polished boulder, divide by the production rate, and you obtain the time since the ice retreated. The catch is that the production rate is not constant across the planet. It varies with altitude, latitude, atmospheric pressure and the strength of Earth’s geomagnetic field, which shields the surface from cosmic radiation. Calibration experiments therefore measure beryllium-10 in surfaces whose true exposure age is known independently, typically from radiocarbon dating, and then use numerical scaling models to extrapolate the site-specific rate to anywhere else on Earth. Most modern calibrations converge on sea-level, high-latitude values of roughly 3.8 to 4.1 atoms per gram of quartz per year, but the residual spread among them is large enough to matter for short-lived events.

Bromley and his colleagues chose the Redpoint Peninsula as their natural laboratory, a low-relief coastal landscape between Loch Torridon and Loch Gairloch underlain by Neoproterozoic Torridonian sandstones. The peninsula carries a conspicuous suite of moraine ridges, first described in 1979, that record a stabilisation or readvance of the decaying last British ice sheet during Termination 1, the final deglaciation that ended the last glacial period. This episode, known as the Wester Ross Readvance, has been dated repeatedly over the years with conflicting results, with published beryllium-10 ages ranging from about 13.5 to 16.3 thousand years depending on which production rate was applied. The key to resolving the ambiguity lay in a small lake called Loch Bad na h-Achlaise, sitting just inside the mapped readvance limits. Sediment cores from the lake basin record the transition from marine to freshwater conditions as the ice retreated and the land rebounded, and the basal organic sediments yielded radiocarbon ages showing the peninsula was ice free by at least 15.9 thousand years ago.

That radiocarbon benchmark is what gives the new study its power. Because the boulders sampled for beryllium-10 analysis all lie above the local marine limit and close to the lake, the onset of organic sedimentation provides a minimum-limiting age for their exposure: the rocks must be at least as old as the lake sediments, and probably somewhat older, since vegetation needed time to colonise the freshly deglaciated basin. The team collected samples from the top few centimetres of eleven glacial boulders at three sites, including perched boulders on ice-moulded bedrock highs and boulders embedded in the crest of the outermost Redpoint moraine. Back in the laboratory, quartz was painstakingly isolated through acid leaching and froth flotation, beryllium was extracted by ion chromatography, and isotope ratios were measured by accelerator mass spectrometry at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Procedural blanks contributed only about one percent of typical sample signals, and two statistical outliers were identified and set aside, leaving nine tightly clustered measurements.

The internal consistency of the nine remaining ages is striking. Treated as a single population, they form a normal distribution whose scatter can be explained by analytical uncertainty alone, with a low reduced chi-squared value. That statistical coherence means the landforms sampled, from terrain outboard of the moraines to the moraine crest itself, were all exposed within a very narrow window of time. It also means the dataset is an ideal yardstick for testing production rates: whatever rate is applied, the relative pattern stays the same, so any systematic offset from the radiocarbon benchmark points directly at the calibration rather than at the geology. Using version 3 of the University of Washington online calculator and three standard scaling schemes, the team calculated apparent exposure ages with eight production-rate datasets drawn from Scotland, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, north-eastern North America and a global compilation.

The results were decisive. Only two of the eight calibrations, Rannoch Moor and the Swiss Chironico landslide, produced mean ages overlapping the radiocarbon control within one standard deviation, and only Rannoch Moor yielded a mean age, 16.1 thousand years, that actually predates the onset of lacustrine sedimentation. The remaining six rates produced ages younger than the radiocarbon benchmark, under-predicting the true deglaciation age by up to seven to eight percent. The worst performers shared a common weakness: their calibration surfaces lack direct, independent age control. The Isle of Skye and Highlands dataset, for example, relies on presumed ages for the deglaciation of cirques correlated with distant climate records, while the Glen Roy calibration ties a wave-cut shoreline to a varve sequence twenty-five kilometres away without unequivocal dating. The Mount Billingen calibration assumes bedrock erosion features correspond to the indirectly dated drainage of the Baltic Ice Lake. Even the widely used Borchers global compilation, the default in popular online calculators, technically passed a statistical test only because of its large internal scatter, and the authors warn it too would yield ages that are stratigraphically too young.

The study also delivers a hard number. Using the radiocarbon control as an independent minimum-limiting age, the team derived a maximum-limiting sea-level, high-latitude beryllium-10 production rate of 3.925 plus or minus 0.070 atoms per gram per year under time-independent scaling. Any production rate higher than this ceiling will produce exposure ages that are unrealistically young relative to the radiocarbon chronology. The finding carries weight beyond Scotland because it independently vindicates the Rannoch Moor calibration, which had come under challenge. A 2019 critique questioned the radiocarbon ages of moss fragments underpinning the calibration, suggesting inbuilt age errors from aquatic carbon or carbonate contamination. Bromley and colleagues systematically dismantle that critique, noting that the re-sampling campaign examined only one of seven original sites, that the new basal ages from that site are virtually indistinguishable from the originals, and that the carbon-isotope values of the dated mosses fall squarely within the range seen in other well-validated British radiocarbon datasets. No carbonate sources exist up-ice of the original coring locations.

Beyond the metrology, the new chronology rewrites the story of the Wester Ross Readvance itself. Because the nine exposure ages from terrain on both sides of the Redpoint moraines are statistically indistinguishable, the ice-margin stabilisation they record must have been brief, lasting no longer than roughly two hundred years. The readvance, previously envisaged by some workers as a spatially extensive resurgence of ice, now appears as a short-lived hiccup in the wholesale collapse of the British ice sheet during Heinrich Stadial 1, a cold interval between about 17.8 and 14.6 thousand years ago. The timing also places the event at least five hundred years earlier than previous estimates. Brief but prominent moraine-building episodes at around this time appear in records from elsewhere in Britain and Ireland and as far afield as New Zealand and South America, hinting at a widespread, if subtle, glacial response to North Atlantic climate variability during the deglaciation.

The broader lesson is one that resonates across the geosciences: a dating method is only as good as its calibration. Surface-exposure dating underpins reconstructions of glacier and ice-sheet behaviour that in turn inform projections of future sea-level rise, so minimising production-rate uncertainty is not an academic nicety but a practical necessity. By anchoring beryllium-10 chronology to an independent radiocarbon benchmark in the same landscape, the Redpoint study shows that calibrations built on directly dated surfaces consistently outperform those resting on inferred ages, and it hands researchers working at mid-latitude Northern Hemisphere sites a validated tool. The boulders of Redpoint, battered by Atlantic gales for sixteen millennia, have finally told the time with precision, and in doing so they have sharpened the clock that scientists around the world use to read the history of a melting planet.

Subject of Research: Calibration and testing of cosmogenic beryllium-10 production rates for surface-exposure dating of the last British ice sheet deglaciation

Article Title: Testing current estimates of the in situ cosmogenic 10Be production rate in the north-western British Isles, with implications for ice sheet behaviour during Termination 1

Article References: Bromley, G. R. M., Hall, B. L., Putnam, A. E., & Lowell, T. V. (2026). Testing current estimates of the in situ cosmogenic 10 Be production rate in the north-western British Isles, with implications for ice sheet behaviour during Termination 1. Geochronology, 8(2), 329-349. https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-8-329-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gchron-8-329-2026

Keywords: cosmogenic nuclide dating, beryllium-10, surface-exposure dating, production rate calibration, British ice sheet, Wester Ross Readvance, Termination 1, Heinrich Stadial 1, radiocarbon dating, Scotland, deglaciation, geochronology

The physics behind the method is elegant. Beryllium-10 is a radioactive isotope forged when galactic cosmic rays smash into oxygen and nitrogen atoms high in the atmosphere, a process called spallation. Because Earth’s magnetic field deflects charged cosmic-ray particles, the production rate of beryllium-10 rises whenever the field weakens. Between 60 and 66 percent of the isotope is produced in the stratosphere, and models indicate that roughly half of the beryllium-10 eventually deposited over Antarctica actually originates at lower latitudes. When the geomagnetic dipole moment drops, production climbs, and the isotope rains down onto the polar ice sheet, where it is locked into annual layers of snow that compress into ice over millennia.

The star of the new record is the Iceland Basin Excursion, an event around 190,000 years ago that is widely regarded as the strongest geomagnetic excursion of the Brunhes chron, the period of normal polarity covering roughly the last 780,000 years. In the Talos Dome ice, the beryllium-10 flux rises to between 1.59 and 2.08 times its background level during a plateau lasting from about 192,000 to 185,600 years ago, with an uncertainty of roughly 1,400 years on each bound. That seven-thousand-year interval of extremely low field strength is consistent with sedimentary estimates suggesting the dipole collapsed by 70 to 80 percent, and it places the Iceland Basin Excursion in the same league as the famous Laschamps event of 41,000 years ago.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the event is its asymmetry. The Talos Dome data show a rapid decline of the dipole followed by a slow, three-step recovery, a pattern already seen in the Dome Fuji ice core and in western equatorial Pacific sediments. Intriguingly, this shape is the temporal opposite of what is observed during full polarity reversals, which typically involve a slow decay of the field followed by an abrupt recovery once the new polarity establishes itself. The authors argue that this consistent asymmetry across both the Iceland Basin and Laschamps excursions may reveal a fundamental difference between the dynamics of excursions and reversals, and they urge that it be carefully considered in future geodynamo modeling efforts.

Beyond the headline event, the record resolves two weaker disturbances that had long been mired in confusing nomenclature. A prolonged dipole decrease between about 218,500 and 206,000 years ago is associated with the Pringle Falls Excursion, while a briefer minimum centred at 242,000 years ago corresponds to the Mamaku Excursion, first recorded in volcanic rocks from New Zealand’s Taupo volcanic zone. Both show beryllium-10 flux enhancements of 1.24 to 1.63 times background. This is the first time either of these moderate-amplitude events has been discussed in an ice core, and their appearance only in flux, rather than in raw concentration, underscores a technical lesson: because snow accumulation rates varied substantially across the warm substages of Marine Isotope Stage 7, concentrations alone can mask genuine production signals.

The team also confronted a subtle artifact that could have corrupted the paleomagnetic interpretation. They identified 40 short-lived minima in beryllium-10 concentration, each confined to one or two consecutive 20-centimeter samples. These minima consistently coincide with spikes in major ion concentrations, including sodium, chloride, and calcium, which originate from such diverse sources as sea spray, crustal dust, and volcanic emissions. The statistical association is highly significant, and calcium-rich conditions in particular stand out: 32 percent of the beryllium-10 minima exceed 15 parts per billion of calcium, compared with only 13 percent of background samples. Because the ions come from unrelated sources, the team rules out atmospheric explanations and instead points to post-depositional processes deep in the ice.

Their favored hypothesis involves the migration of impurities along ice crystal boundaries. In the deepest, warmest sections of ice cores, large ice grains and enhanced impurity relocation can bind beryllium into dust-rich aggregates at grain boundaries, which the ion-exchange chemistry used to extract the isotope does not fully recover, producing apparent concentration minima. Crucially, once these artifacts are identified and removed, the long-term flux signal remains intact, and the geomagnetic record survives. The finding carries a practical warning for projects hunting ice older than 1.5 million years, such as Beyond EPICA: highly altered deep ice may require improved extraction protocols that account for in-ice remobilization of cosmogenic nuclides.

Cross-checking against other archives proved remarkably successful. The Talos Dome flux variations agree closely with the Dome Fuji beryllium-10 record over their overlapping interval, and both mirror the authigenic beryllium-10 to beryllium-9 ratios measured in marine sediment cores. Fine-scale features, including a short-lived recovery at 182,000 years ago and a flux minimum near 178,000 years ago, appear in both ice cores and ocean sediments, offering valuable tie points for synchronizing paleoclimate archives across entirely different media. One apparent discrepancy, a roughly 3,000-year offset between the oceanic and ice records, the authors attribute to uncertainties in the marine age model rather than a genuine physical lag, noting that the offset does not vary between glacial and interglacial intervals as an ocean-circulation effect would.

The study also documents a persistent puzzle of Antarctic beryllium geochemistry: absolute fluxes at Dome Fuji run nearly twice as high as those at Talos Dome, a pattern that persists into the recent past and appears unrelated to glacial-interglacial climate variability. The team suggests regional differences in atmospheric deposition, including a transition from wet to dry deposition south of 75 degrees south latitude and enhanced stratosphere-troposphere exchange over the highest domes. Importantly, this affects amplitude but not timing, so relative variations across sites still faithfully track changes in cosmic-ray production.

The implications reach beyond paleomagnetism. A reliable, well-dated record of dipole collapses provides a global synchronization tool for aligning ice, sediment, and volcanic archives across the Pleistocene, refining age models where independent dating is scarce. The Iceland Basin Excursion, with its prolonged seven-millennium low field and interglacial setting, also offers an analogue for reassessing claims that the Laschamps event disrupted atmospheric chemistry and ecosystems. And at a deeper level, each high-resolution record of the geodynamo’s erratic behavior brings scientists closer to answering a fundamental question: whether the seemingly random fluctuations of Earth’s magnetic field are truly stochastic, or the signature of deterministic but chaotic dynamics churning in the liquid iron core, two thousand miles beneath our feet.

Subject of Research: Reconstruction of geomagnetic dipole intensity variations from 170 to 270 ka BP using atmospheric beryllium-10 in the Talos Dome East Antarctic ice core

Article Title: Atmospheric 10Be from Talos Dome (East Antarctic) ice core records geomagnetic dipole intensity from 170 to 270 ka BP

Article References: Lamothe, A., Bard, E., Thouveny, N., Auriol, E., Severi, M., Traversi, R., De Angelis, M., Wilhelms, F., Mulvaney, R., Zaidi, F., Aumaitre, G., Keddadouche, K., & Baroni, M. (2026). Atmospheric 10 Be from Talos Dome (East Antarctic) ice core records geomagnetic dipole intensity from 170 to 270 ka BP. Geochronology, 8(2), 351-371. https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-8-351-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gchron-8-351-2026

Keywords: beryllium-10, geomagnetic excursion, Iceland Basin Excursion, Pringle Falls Excursion, Mamaku Excursion, Talos Dome ice core, East Antarctica, cosmogenic radionuclides, geodynamo, paleomagnetism, ice core chronology, Marine Isotope Stage 7

The technique behind the measurement sounds like science fiction but rests on elegant physics. Cosmic rays constantly bombard Earth’s upper atmosphere, and secondary particles penetrate a meter or two into rock and soil, splitting atomic nuclei and producing cosmogenic nuclides such as beryllium-10 in situ. The slower a land surface erodes, the longer its minerals linger near the surface and the more beryllium-10 accumulates. Concentrations of the isotope are therefore inversely proportional to erosion rate. By measuring beryllium-10 in quartz separated from river sand, scientists obtain a catchment-averaged denudation rate integrated over thousands of years — a timescale no sediment gauge could ever match.

Lianqing Zhang of Friedrich Schiller University Jena and colleagues collected 22 quartz-rich samples across the Roda Catchment: 17 river sand samples from active streams and 5 soil samples taken from flat agricultural fields near the catchment divides. The bedrock consists mainly of siliciclastic Buntsandstein sedimentary rocks, and the total relief does not exceed 260 meters, with flat uplands dissected by incised river channels. The team purified quartz through acid treatments, added a precisely calibrated beryllium-9 carrier prepared from a phenakite crystal from Norway, and measured beryllium-10 to beryllium-9 ratios at the Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator, normalized to standards traceable to NIST 4325.

The resulting numbers tell a layered story. Catchment-wide denudation rates range from 23.8 plus or minus 5.4 to 79 plus or minus 18 millimeters per thousand years, with an uncertainty-weighted mean of 59.3 millimeters per thousand years. One sample, Roda4, yielded an anomalously low value of 23.8 millimeters per thousand years, likely because humanmade stone revetments built from foreign rock have disturbed the natural sediment supply along the upstream river reach. Excluding that outlier, the weighted mean rises to 61.6 millimeters per thousand years. Local denudation rates from the flat divides are distinctly lower, spanning 23.4 to 41.9 millimeters per thousand years with a weighted mean of 33.5.

To place these figures in context, the researchers compared them with the global Octopus database of beryllium-10-derived denudation rates and with worldwide short-term erosion rates compiled from gauging-station sediment fluxes. The comparison produced a striking pattern: denudation rates across Europe, with the Roda values squarely within that range, are generally much higher than rates elsewhere on the planet. In cumulative-distribution terms, the median European rate exceeds 40 millimeters per thousand years — more than double the global median. Slope exerts a similar control on erosion in Europe and worldwide, so topography alone cannot explain the gap.

The most plausible culprit, the authors argue, is periglacial dynamics during the last glacial period. The averaging timescales of beryllium-10-derived rates in Europe stretch back roughly 9,000 to 20,000 years, deep into a time when vast areas of the continent lay beyond glacier margins but were gripped by permafrost. Processes such as cryoturbation — the churning of soil by freeze-thaw cycles — and solifluction, the slow downslope creep of waterlogged frozen ground, ravaged the landscape. Cover-bed sequences found on slopes between 37 and 56 degrees north attest that frost-driven processes once affected enormous ice-free expanses of central and northern Europe, fundamentally altering erodibility in ways still recorded in today’s isotope budgets.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding is that long-term denudation rates in Europe exceed recent, short-term erosion rates, despite decades of intensive agriculture, deforestation, mining, and construction. Gauged erosion rates show far greater scatter than the isotope-derived values, reflecting the stochastic nature of human disturbance, yet their median is dramatically lower — the cumulative-distribution midpoint jumps from roughly 50 millimeters per thousand years for long-term rates to more than 200 for short-term measurements in the opposite direction of expectation. Several factors converge to explain this. Gauging stations capture only suspended sediment and miss dissolved loads, which can dominate in carbonate terrain. More importantly, decadal records routinely miss rare, high-magnitude flood events that move enormous sediment volumes in hours but matter enormously over millennia.

Human history adds a further twist. Reconstructions show that Europe experienced extensive forest clearance during Roman and Medieval times as agriculture expanded and forests were exploited for fuel and timber, and fluvial and lake archives across the continent record the resulting pulses of hillslope erosion. Global syntheses suggest land use can accelerate natural erosion by a factor of two to three under moderate intensity and by up to an order of magnitude under intensive cultivation. Paradoxically, these historical episodes of erosion may already be baked into the long-term beryllium-10 signal, while the modern gauged record — partly protected by reforestation and soil conservation — reflects a calmer present. The frozen past and the plowed past together outweigh the measured present.

Finally, the mismatch between catchment-wide and local rates offers a rare window into changing topography. Because the catchment interior is eroding at about 62 millimeters per thousand years while the flat divides lower at about 34, the landscape is losing relief — valleys deepening faster than the uplands wear down. Correcting for the thick, low-density soil mantle at the divides, which would imply a divide rate as high as 69 millimeters per thousand years if all eroded material were soil, the team brackets the relief change between roughly 0 and 28 millimeters per thousand years over the past 10,000 years. That range sits comfortably alongside estimates from the Harz Mountains and the Black Forest, suggesting that the gentle uplands of central Germany are still, slowly and invisibly, being sculpted by processes set in motion when ice-age frost last gripped the land.

Subject of Research: Cosmogenic beryllium-10 dating of long-term denudation rates in a central German low-relief catchment

Article Title: Beryllium-10-derived denudation rates in the Roda Catchment, Germany

Article References: Beryllium-10-derived denudation rates in the Roda Catchment, Germany. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.5194/egqsj-75-19-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/egqsj-75-19-2026

Keywords: cosmogenic nuclides, beryllium-10, denudation rates, periglacial processes, last glacial period, geomorphology, Thuringia, erosion, landscape evolution, quaternary science, accelerator mass spectrometry, relief change

The research, published in the journal Geochronology, was led by José M. Marmolejo-Cossío and Isaac J. Larsen of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, together with Eyal Marder and Alan J. Hidy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The team focused on the East River watershed near Crested Butte, Colorado, a steep alpine catchment draining the Elk Range of the Rocky Mountains and feeding the Gunnison River, a major tributary of the Colorado. Elevations in the watershed span roughly 2,600 to 4,100 meters, mean annual temperature hovers near zero degrees Celsius, and most precipitation arrives as snow that can pile up several meters deep. Crucially, the bedrock is dominated by Cretaceous Mancos Shale, a quartz-poor rock that thwarts the standard method of measuring erosion with beryllium-10 produced inside mineral grains. That limitation makes the watershed an ideal proving ground for the meteoric variety of the isotope, which can be measured in almost any soil regardless of quartz content.

The researchers’ strategy hinged on a gift from the last ice age. Between roughly 18,000 and 13,000 years ago, Pleistocene glaciers carved cirques into the high peaks and dumped moraines, ridges of glacial debris, across the valley floors. Because previous work had independently dated five of these moraines using in situ-produced beryllium-10 in boulders, the team knew exactly how long each land surface had been exposed to the sky. By digging soil pits into the flattest crests of the moraines, sampling in depth increments down to 145 centimeters, and measuring the total inventory of meteoric beryllium-10 in each profile, they could divide the accumulated atoms by the landform age to recover a millennial-averaged delivery rate. The approach assumes the clock started when the ice retreated, and the team carefully corrected for inherited atoms that had stuck to mineral grains before the sediments were deposited.

The laboratory work was formidable. Roughly half a gram of powdered soil from each depth interval was fused with fluxes in platinum crucibles, spiked with a known quantity of stable beryllium-9, and chemically purified through repeated dissolution and precipitation steps. The resulting beryllium oxide was packed into cathodes and analyzed by accelerator mass spectrometry at Lawrence Livermore, where 10Be/9Be ratios on the order of 10^-12 were measured against calibrated standards, with process blanks several orders of magnitude lower. The team also measured soil pH in water and calcium chloride solutions, because beryllium retention in soils depends strongly on acidity: soils with pH above roughly 4 hold onto the isotope, while more acidic profiles can leach it away. Natural beryllium-9 in the samples turned out to be negligible compared with the added carrier, simplifying the interpretation.

The results are striking. Inheritance-corrected inventories ranged from 7.68 billion to 23.5 billion atoms per square centimeter, and the corresponding fluxes ranged from about 430,000 to 1.8 million atoms per square centimeter per year across the five sites. When the researchers additionally modeled losses from erosion and from desorption, the chemical detachment of beryllium from mineral surfaces and its downward migration in soil water, corrected fluxes spanned 310,000 to 3.7 million atoms per square centimeter per year, deviating from the uncorrected values by factors of 0.3 to 2.1. Desorption losses were predicted to be greatest at the highest, most acidic Copper Creek site, where modeled losses ran an order of magnitude above those at the other moraines, while erosional losses peaked at the most topographically convex Gothic moraine.

Perhaps the most consequential finding is how tightly the flux tracks the mountain environment. Inheritance-corrected fluxes correlated with elevation with an R-squared of 0.91, with mean annual precipitation at 0.82 to 0.85, with mean snow depth at 0.95 to 0.97, and with snow water equivalent at 0.97 to 0.98. The reason is orography: within the East River watershed, precipitation increases with elevation as moist air is forced upslope, so the cosmic isotope rains down faster on the high country than on the valley floor. By applying these regression equations to high-resolution gridded datasets, including 3-meter LiDAR elevation models, downscaled PRISM precipitation data, and Airborne Snow Observatory maps of snow depth and snow water equivalent, the team produced the first spatially resolved maps of beryllium-10 flux for an entire mountain watershed, with watershed-averaged predictions of 1.1 to 3.8 million atoms per square centimeter per year depending on the predictor chosen.

The snow-based maps revealed a subtle topographic fingerprint that precipitation averages alone would miss. Because wind and avalanches strip snow from sharp ridge crests and pile it on adjacent slopes, the models predict lower beryllium-10 accumulation on ridgelines than on nearby hillsides. Yet the snow data also carry risks: they cover only two winters, a vanishingly small slice of the roughly 15,000 years over which the soils have collected the isotope, and some of the deepest snow measurements in the watershed, exceeding 20 meters, are likely measurement artifacts. Elevation, by contrast, is the only predictor immune to temporal bias, though it too can mislead where local topography redistributes snow. The authors suggest that, much like exposure-age analysts who average results from multiple production-rate scaling models, future users of meteoric beryllium-10 may need to adopt an ensemble approach that weighs all of these predictors.

The comparison with existing models was sobering. A widely used empirical model that predicts flux as a function of precipitation and latitude overestimated the measured fluxes by factors of 1.8 to 3.8 relative to inheritance-corrected values, and by 1.0 to 6.0 relative to erosion- and desorption-corrected values. Global circulation models, which simulate atmospheric production and transport of the isotope, fared better at the watershed scale: their predictions of roughly 1.46 to 2.12 million atoms per square centimeter per year generally fell within the range of the locally calibrated watershed averages. But a single grid cell in these global models covers an area larger than the entire watershed, so they completely miss the within-basin variability driven by orographic precipitation. At the site scale, the highest model-based prediction exceeded the lowest corrected field flux by a factor of 7 to 13.

The East River fluxes also fit into a broader regional picture. Soil-inventory-based estimates from the wetter Colorado Front Range and the drier Wind River Mountains of Wyoming cluster around 1.3 to 1.5 million atoms per square centimeter per year, and the East River values of 0.43 to 1.8 million are broadly consistent, with the driest site in the study falling below the regional norms. One complication the authors flag is dust: windblown particles carry beryllium-10 that was scavenged elsewhere, potentially contributing up to about 20 percent of the total flux in some settings. In the Colorado Front Range, dust is thought to contribute less than 10 percent, and if East River conditions are similar, the discrepancy with global models would not change substantially, though the dust contribution there remains unconstrained.

The practical payoff could be considerable. Because meteoric beryllium-10 can be measured in quartz-poor shales and paired with stable beryllium-9 to estimate catchment-wide denudation and chemical weathering, a locally calibrated flux transforms the East River watershed, already an intensive Department of Energy research site for watershed science, into a place where erosion and weathering rates can be quantified across shale terrain that the standard method cannot touch. More broadly, the study demonstrates a template for other alpine landscapes: combine independently dated landforms, careful soil chemistry, and modern high-resolution LiDAR and snowpack datasets to turn a global cosmic drizzle into a locally predictable tool. The atoms fall from the sky whether we measure them or not; this work shows how to read them accurately.

Subject of Research: Measurement of meteoric beryllium-10 deposition fluxes from soil inventories on glacial moraines in the East River watershed, Colorado

Article Title: Meteoric beryllium-10 fluxes from soil inventory measurements in the East River watershed, Colorado, USA

Article References: Marmolejo-Cossío, J. M., Larsen, I. J., Marder, E., & Hidy, A. J. (2026). Meteoric beryllium-10 fluxes from soil inventory measurements in the East River watershed, Colorado, USA. Geochronology, 8(3), 547-565. https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-8-547-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gchron-8-547-2026

Keywords: beryllium-10, cosmogenic nuclides, glacial moraines, soil inventories, erosion rates, East River watershed, Colorado, orographic precipitation, geochronology, accelerator mass spectrometry, snow water equivalent, watershed science

The problem the researchers set out to solve is a stubborn one. Peatlands are among the largest terrestrial carbon reservoirs on the planet, and their expansion after the last ice age helped shape the concentration of methane and carbon dioxide in the Holocene atmosphere. Yet peat is perishable. Radiocarbon dating, the workhorse of peatland science, reaches back less than 50,000 years, and in formerly glaciated northern landscapes, ice sheets destroyed nearly all peat that formed before the Last Glacial Maximum. In old, undisturbed bogs, decomposition eventually balances the input of fresh plant litter, so the modern peat column no longer records the full history of peat on the landscape. Everything scientists believe about peatlands before the last glacial cycle therefore rests on a handful of exceptionally well-preserved deposits and on computer models.

The Belgian team’s solution exploits a property of quartz that has become one of geomorphology’s most powerful tools. Cosmic rays striking the uppermost meters of the Earth’s surface produce rare isotopes, including beryllium-10 and aluminum-26, inside mineral grains. The deeper a grain sits beneath overlying material, the fewer cosmic rays reach it, so the concentration of these cosmogenic nuclides in a sample carries a memory of how much mass, in this case peat, shielded it over its exposure history. Crucially, the two isotopes decay at different rates: aluminum-26 has a half-life of about 717,000 years while beryllium-10 persists for about 1.39 million years. When a landscape erodes slowly enough, the mismatch between these clocks becomes measurable, and the ratio of the two isotopes can be unpicked to yield both the rate of landscape lowering and the average thickness of the blanket above it simultaneously.

The Hautes Fagnes turned out to be an almost ideal natural laboratory. Perched on the highest ground in the Belgian Ardennes, the plateau receives about 1,440 millimeters of rain per year while mean annual temperatures hover near 6.7 degrees Celsius, and persistent orographic cloud keeps evapotranspiration low, conditions that favor peat accumulation. The study hillslope sits upstream of a mid-Pleistocene knickzone on the Hoëgne river, in a landscape so sluggish that it has barely responded to the uplift that rejuvenated rivers elsewhere in the Ardennes. The team cored through the modern peat blanket, which ranges from 0.2 to 2.1 meters deep along the transect, to collect saprolite, the rotted bedrock beneath, at six positions from the interfluve down to the channel. They also gathered stream sediment at the base of the slope and spent a full year gauging discharge and sampling stream water for dissolved silicon.

The measurements delivered a surprise. In quartz formed at the surface, aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 accumulate in a characteristic production ratio, about 7.2 at this site. Every sample the team analyzed fell below that ratio, from 3.29 at the summit to 6.06 at the toe-slope, and all plotted below the steady-state denudation line on a two-nuclide diagram by more than the modern peat cover could explain. Because the site sits near a local topographic high in a region never overridden by ice, deep burial by sediment or glaciers could not account for the deficit. The only plausible interpretation was that the samples had spent their exposure histories under substantially more shielding than the present-day peat provides, in other words, that the peat used to be much thicker.

To turn that qualitative signal into numbers, the researchers built a sophisticated inverse model. They accounted for the fact that saturated peat, which is roughly 90 percent water, attenuates cosmic radiation differently from mineral rock, adopting a shorter absorption mean free path of about 110 grams per square centimeter in peat compared with 160 in saprolite. They also modeled muon-induced production, which matters greatly under thick cover because muons penetrate far deeper than ordinary cosmic-ray nucleons. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo inversion then explored millions of parameter combinations to find those consistent with the measured isotope concentrations, yielding probability distributions rather than single answers. The results were cross-checked against an entirely independent estimate of the watershed-scale denudation rate, about 7.2 tons per square kilometer per year, derived from dissolved silicon fluxes and the weathering intensity of the regolith, which agreed in order of magnitude with the cosmogenic values.

The modeled denudation rates were astonishingly low, between 0.3 and 4.9 tons per square kilometer per year, equivalent to a landscape lowering of roughly 0.1 to 1.9 meters per million years, placing the Ardennes plateau among the slowest-eroding landscapes on Earth, comparable to ancient surfaces in Brazil, Australia, and South Africa. Because erosion is so slow, the isotope signal integrates over 0.7 to 1.8 million years, spanning every glacial-interglacial cycle since the mid-Pleistocene. Against that long baseline, the median long-term overburden thicknesses exceeded modern values by 190 to 350 grams per square centimeter along the transect, equivalent to roughly 1.8 to 3.4 meters of saturated peat. The inferred thicknesses, between about 2.5 and 4.2 meters, are physically sensible: they fall below the roughly 8.5-meter maximum observed in plateau raised bogs such as Misten, and their relationship to hillslope gradient obeys the classic groundwater-mound physics that governs steady-state bog morphology.

So where did the missing meters of peat go? The team systematically ruled out alternatives. Snow cover, even at persistent winter maxima, would add only a few grams per square centimeter of shielding on average, two orders of magnitude too little. A continuous loess blanket thick enough to explain the signal would have to exceed a meter and a half, yet no loess survives at the site and the geochemistry of the saprolite shows it formed in place from the underlying bedrock. Ground ice during periglacial episodes was too local and too short-lived. That leaves human activity. Peat cutting for fuel is documented in the Hautes Fagnes since the sixteenth century and intensified dramatically in the nineteenth, when records show nearly 200,000 cubic meters extracted annually. Medieval mowing, grazing, slash-and-burn cultivation, and wildfires shifted the bogs into negative mass balance, and drainage ditches plus spruce plantations in the early twentieth century accelerated subsidence at rates of one to two centimeters per year reported for comparable bogs. Together, the authors calculate, these pressures could account for more than two meters of peat loss, explaining most of the gap between the long-term average and today’s thin blanket.

The summit sample held one final revelation. Its model clearly resolved a step-change in overburden thickness, a thickening event with peak probability between 0.8 and 1.4 million years ago, which the authors interpret as the onset of the peat blanket itself. Remarkably, that timing coincides with a well-documented pulse of tectonic uplift in the Ardennes, recorded by the abandonment of the Younger main terrace of the Meuse and Rhine rivers around 0.7 million years ago. Before that uplift, the summit stood near 530 meters elevation, just below the threshold where orographic cooling and cloudiness begin to create the cool, wet conditions peat requires. As the massif rose roughly 100 meters, the site crossed into peat-forming territory, tying the birth of this carbon-rich ecosystem directly to the slow breathing of the Earth’s crust.

Beyond its local story, the study carries a warning for anyone estimating erosion rates in peatland terrain. If the beryllium-10 concentration in the stream sediment were interpreted the conventional way, assuming the modern peat cover represents long-term steady state, the resulting erosion rate would overestimate landscape lowering by an order of magnitude, because depressed aluminum-26 to beryllium-10 ratios masquerade as deep burial rather than thick organic cover. The paired-nuclide approach demonstrated here should work in any slowly eroding, unglaciated landscape with peat, from the moorlands of southwestern Britain to tropical cratonic peatlands in Amazonia and the Congo basin. And pairing beryllium-10 with cosmogenic carbon-14, whose short half-life suits faster-eroding and formerly glaciated terrain, could soon extend the method to peatlands worldwide. At a moment when drained and degraded peatlands are recognized as ticking carbon bombs, the Hautes Fagnes offer a sobering baseline: what we see today is not what these landscapes once were, and the atmosphere remembers the difference.

Subject of Research: Using paired cosmogenic 26Al and 10Be nuclides to reconstruct long-term peat thickness and denudation rates in the Hautes Fagnes upland peatland, Belgian Ardennes

Article Title: Long-term peat thickness from cosmogenic 26Al and 10Be, Hautes Fagnes, Belgian Ardennes

Article References: Moore, A., Henrion, M., Li, Y., du Bois d'Aische, E., Gautschi, P., Christl, M., Jonard, F., Lambot, S., Van Oost, K., Opfergelt, S., & Vanacker, V. (2026). Long-term peat thickness from cosmogenic 26 Al and 10 Be, Hautes Fagnes, Belgian Ardennes. Earth Surface Dynamics, 14(5), 763-780. https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-14-763-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/esurf-14-763-2026

Keywords: cosmogenic nuclides, peatlands, beryllium-10, aluminum-26, Hautes Fagnes, Belgian Ardennes, denudation rates, carbon cycle, peat degradation, land use history, mid-Pleistocene uplift, Earth Surface Dynamics

The research centered on a careful comparison of two sets of ice cores drilled from the Guliya ice cap, one recovered in 1992 and the other in 2015. When the team analyzed the oxygen isotope patterns preserved in both samples, they found strikingly similar signatures, indicating that the environmental signals locked within the ice are consistent and reproducible across a gap of more than two decades. This kind of internal agreement is a cornerstone of paleoclimate science, because it demonstrates that the record has not been distorted by melting, refreezing, or other processes that can scramble the layered history of a glacier. Lonnie Thompson, lead author of the study, professor of earth sciences and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University, emphasized the significance of this match, noting that reproducibility of records within a given ice cap is extremely important and that obtaining an identical record a quarter of a century later reveals a great deal about the behavior of the ice over time.

Determining the true age of ancient ice is one of the most technically demanding challenges in glaciology. Ice cores serve as vital climate archives of the locations and time periods they represent, but deciphering these flash-frozen treasure troves requires an accurate knowledge of the core’s timescale. Without reliable dating, the chemical and physical signals within the ice cannot be confidently matched to specific climatic events. To overcome this obstacle, the research team deployed advanced dating techniques capable of detecting two radioactive isotopes, beryllium and chlorine, whose half-lives make them reliable tools for capturing large-scale environmental changes across deep time. These cosmogenic isotopes are produced when cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere and are then deposited onto the ice surface, where their concentrations can serve as chronological markers for extraordinary events in Earth’s history.

The pivotal marker used in this study was the Laschamp Geomagnetic Excursion, a dramatic reversal of Earth’s magnetic field that occurred more than 41,000 years ago. During this event, the planet’s protective magnetic shield weakened substantially, allowing greater fluxes of cosmic radiation to reach the atmosphere. That surge in cosmic ray intensity produced elevated concentrations of cosmogenic isotopes such as beryllium-10 and chlorine-36, which were subsequently deposited and preserved in the accumulating snow of the Guliya ice cap. By identifying this distinctive isotopic spike within the cores and anchoring it to the well-established timing of the Laschamp event, the team was able to construct a robust chronological framework for the ice, effectively pinning a known date onto the deep layers of the glacier and allowing the ages of overlying and underlying ice to be constrained with far greater confidence.

To further validate and extend this timescale, the researchers compared their isotope-based results with oxygen-isotope records obtained from cave deposits in nearby regions of the Tibetan Plateau. Speleothems, the mineral formations that grow in caves, carry their own independent records of past climate and can be dated with high precision using uranium-series methods. The alignment between the Guliya ice core signals and these cave records led the team to estimate that the age of the Guliya record may stretch back well over 128,000 years, a span that reaches into or beyond the last interglacial period. This cross-verification between two entirely independent paleoclimate archives represents a powerful convergence of evidence, strengthening the case that the deepest ice at Guliya predates the Holocene by a wide margin.

The significance of this finding becomes especially clear when placed in a global context. Thompson pointed out that outside of the polar regions, this is the only ice core from the mountaintops that reaches back that far. He contrasted the Guliya record with that of Huascarán in the Peruvian Andes, another celebrated high-altitude drilling site where the ice record extends back only over 30,000 years rather than over 100,000. That comparison makes Guliya a very unique record, preserving a continuous or near-continuous account of climate variability across a stretch of time that no other mountain glacier on Earth has been shown to retain. For scientists seeking to reconstruct how monsoons, temperature regimes, and atmospheric circulation patterns behaved across multiple glacial cycles in Asia, the Guliya cores now stand as an irreplaceable resource.

The new evidence also settles a persistent scientific controversy. Previous work had suggested that the Guliya record stopped at the Mid-Holocene, an era that began nearly 12,000 years ago, implying that the ice cap contained only relatively young ice. If that interpretation had been correct, it would have meant that the large ice sheets of the last ice age did not persist through the early Holocene on the Tibetan Plateau. The evidence from this work lays those doubts to rest, confirming that some of the ice is in fact much older than the Holocene. As Thompson explained, if only Holocene-era ice existed in Tibet, it would indicate that the great ice masses of the last glacial period failed to survive into the current warm epoch, but the data demonstrate that they did. This confirmation reshapes scientific understanding of glacial persistence in one of the most climatically sensitive regions on the planet, often described as the water tower of Asia because its glaciers feed major river systems serving billions of people.

Guliya’s distinctive topography likely plays an important role in its extraordinary ability to preserve such ancient paleoclimate records. The ice cap sits at extreme altitude, where frigid temperatures limit surface melting, and its geometry may shield deeper layers from the deformation and basal processes that typically destroy old ice. Yet the value of constructing a more accurate timescale for the ice cap extends beyond validating its antiquity. A precise chronology opens the door to answering bigger environmental questions, such as when Earth’s intense periods of glaciation began and ended. Thompson framed the challenge in stark terms, asking when ice started forming on the planet and what the natural processes of ice loss looked like, and observing that the only way to truly demonstrate these dynamics is with accurate timescales on these records. In an era when scientists are working to distinguish natural climate variability from human-driven change, benchmarks of past glacial behavior drawn directly from ice are indispensable.

Because these results open new pathways for detailed scientific investigations of the Guliya ice cores, the team plans to use future samples to determine how other key climate and environmental indicators may change in light of this revised understanding of Earth’s geologic history. Dust concentrations, trapped atmospheric gases, microbial communities, and a host of geochemical tracers preserved in the ice can now be interpreted against a trustworthy timeline, potentially yielding insights into past atmospheric composition and ecosystem responses at altitudes above six kilometers. The international collaboration behind the study included Ohio State co-authors Mary Davis and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, along with Juerg Beer from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Christof Vockenhuber and Marcus Christl from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, Tandong Yao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Ninglian Wang and Ling Fang from Northwest University in China, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Reflecting on the work, Thompson observed that the results tell a very consistent story, and that if the science is done right, it is consistent, adding that it is human understanding of what the ice is trying to tell us that has to catch up.

Subject of Research: Dating of ancient ice cores from the Guliya ice cap on the Tibetan Plateau

Article Title: Digging deep, researchers find high-altitude glacier endured last ice age

Article References: Digging deep, researchers find high-altitude glacier endured last ice age. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Guliya ice cap, Tibetan Plateau, ice cores, paleoclimatology, Laschamp Geomagnetic Excursion, cosmogenic isotopes, beryllium-10, chlorine-36, oxygen isotopes, last ice age, glaciology, Science Advances