| 27 Nov 2025
Assessing the potential for an ice core in the southern Antarctic Peninsula to elucidate Holocene climate history
Abstract. Connecting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to the southern Antarctic Peninsula, northern Ellsworth Land is a region of enigmatic glacial history now experiencing significant cryospheric change. Large portions of the Bellingshausen-Sea-draining basins have experienced extreme ice thinning and grounding-line change over the satellite observation period. However, the Holocene glacial history of northern Ellsworth Land, which would help to frame the contemporary changes being observed, is poorly constrained. High-resolution ice cores are crucial for reconstructing this past ice-sheet change. We identify a new deep ice-core drilling site at the triple-ice divide point between the Amundsen, Bellingshausen, and Weddell seas (74°34'37" S, 86°54'16" W) that could be utilised to address this knowledge gap. Using a transient ice-thinning model, constrained by shallow-ice-core data and dated englacial radar stratigraphy, we estimate records of accumulation and derive a preliminary age-depth scale for the proposed coring site. Inclusion of dated radar stratigraphy in the model improves our constraints on the long-term climate history, and highlights that these data are not compatible with a steady-state assumption. We also show that there has been a significant change in the accumulation rate regime or ice thickness throughout the Holocene. A deep ice core at this site would provide a climate record up to ∼30 ka with a resolution of 0.58 ka/m at 60 m above the ice-bed interface. An analysis of the model sensitivity to basal melting shows that a record beyond the onset of the Holocene could still be recovered under high basal-melt-rate scenarios. We thus conclude that an ice core at this site would yield a valuable high-resolution climate record and provide precise constraints to reconstruct climatic changes and glacial retreat during the Holocene, to help resolve the onset of the extensive dynamic thinning observed today.
Competing interests: At least one of the (co-)authors is a member of the editorial board of The Cryosphere.
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