Neoglaciation
The neoglaciation ("renewed
global warming-induced temperature increase starting in the 20th century. The neoglaciation has no well-marked universal beginning: local conditions and ecological inertia
affected the onset of detectably cooler (and wetter) conditions.
Driven inexorably by the
Climatic Optimum and the advance or reformation of glaciers that had not existed since the last ice age. In the mountains of western North America, montane glaciers that had completely melted reformed shortly before 5000 BP.[2] The most severe part of the best documented neoglacial period, especially in Europe and the North Atlantic, is termed the "Little Ice Age
".
In North America, neoglaciation had ecological effects in the spread of muskeg on flat, poorly drained land, such as the bed of recently drained Lake Agassiz and in the Hudson Bay lowlands, in the retreat of grassland before an advancing forest border in the Great Plains, and in shifting ranges of forest trees and diagnostic plant species (identified through palynology).
See also
Notes
- ^ E.C. Pielou 1991:291; S.C. Porter and G.H. Denton, "Chronology of the neo-glaciation in the North American cordillera", American Journal of Science 265 (1967:177-210), noted in E.C. Pielou, After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1991:15 note 13. Pielou discusses the neoglaciation in ch. 14 "The Neoglaciation" pp 291-310.
- glacial moraines suggest that mountain glaciers in British Columbiahave advanced and receded twice more recently, with advances peaking about 2800 BP and 300 BP (noting G.H. Denton and W. Karlen, ""Holocene climatic variations— their pattern and possible cause", Quaternary Research 3 1973:155-205), and J.M. Ryder and B. Thomson, "Neoglaciation in the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia: chronology prior to the Late Neoglacial Maximum", Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 23 1986:273-87.
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