New pathway proposed for ancient flood

Meltwaters off northwestern Canada’s ice sheet would have shut down the ocean’s heat circulation 13,000 years ago

Natural disasters in the Arctic aren’t always a sign of global warming. A catastrophic deluge of freshwater pouring into the Arctic Ocean from northwestern Canada might have triggered the planet’s last major cold spell nearly 13,000 years ago, a new study finds. That’s a different pathway than the standard explanation for this big chill.
New computer simulations indicate ocean currents would have transported the Arctic floodwaters to the North Atlantic near Greenland, where the freshwater would have disrupted the ocean’s circulation of heat. Freshwater flowing into the Atlantic through Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence — the previously hypothesized source of the flood — would have been carried too far south to disturb heat flow, researchers report online November 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [...] sciencenews.org/