BRITICE-CHRONO (2011-2018) was a NERC-funded consortium project between the universities of Sheffield, Aberystwyth, Durham, Bangor, Liverpool, Ulster, Glasgow, Swansea, the British Antarctic Survey, British Geological Survey and Geological Survey of Ireland, bringing together more than 50 international researchers.
The project revolutionised understanding of the advance and retreat of the last British-Irish Ice Sheet between 31,000 to 15,000 years ago and which covered most of these landmasses and extending hundreds of kilometres offshore. The project team collected 914 samples from across Britain and Ireland, allowing them to triple the number of dated sites constraining the timing and rates of change of the collapsing ice sheet.
The special issue of the Journal of Quaternary Science synthesises these findings of ice advancing to the maximum extent and its subsequent retreat to produce definitive palaeogeographic reconstructions of ice margin positions.
Principal Investigator Professor Chris Clark said: “Previous climate warming killed the once mighty, kilometres thick, British-Irish Ice Sheet. What does it tell us about how ice sheets collapse? Firstly, we needed the pattern of ice marginal retreat to allow us to go to the right places to collect samples for dating, so that we could get data on when and how fast the ice sheet retreated. We started on the pattern in 1995 and on dating in 2012 on the BRITICE-CHRONO project, and it is now such a huge moment that we have this special issue detailing the current state of the art.
“It has been a long journey and I am pleased to report that the British-Irish Ice Sheet is now the World's most well-constrained and understood retreating ice sheet. It is a data-rich environment for testing and improving the ice sheet models that we use to forecast polar ice loss and rising sea levels.”