By Jo Nova
Antarctica would have been unrecognizable
The worst global warming nightmares all came true 130,000 years ago, done by mother nature all by herself. Most of the time the media ignores all this inconvenient catastrophe that lasted an astonishing ten thousand years. New research suggests almost all the Ross Ice Shelf melted and large parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared too, yet somehow Emperor penguins survived. So did the seals and the whales, and there was no tipping point that broke the planet. But the Hunter-gatherer beach clubs of 131,000 years ago were all washed away.
A new study looked at dust in Antarctic ice cores and noticed there was an ominous shift 120,000 years ago. In other periods the ice core had a layer of fine dust that seems to have traveled all the way from South American volcanoes. But when the Earth last warmed out of the depths of the ice age 130,000 years ago, a different type of coarse grainy dust appeared in the ice core they dug out. Normally big grains don’t travel far on the wind, so this implied that it was coming from a close volcanic source. And while there are plenty of volcanoes on Antarctica, they are normally buried under ice and their dust doesn’t spread. This meant the icesheets must have melted so far that the volcanoes were exposed.
The isotopic fingerprint of the fine dust matched dust from volcanoes in South America. But the large grained dust matched rocks in McMurdo Sound in the West Antarctic Rift area.
We already knew things must have been dramatic in Antarctica at the time because sea levels were so much higher. There are remnants of corals up to 9 meters higher near Kalbarri in Western Australia, a stable part of very old crustal plate.
The map dramatically changed:
The Eemian period was hotter than our current Holocene.
Lest we forget, every hottest ever record today is nothing compared what has already happened.
Seas are rising at 1 to 3mm a year. Yet humanity saw the seas rise by 125 meters (twice) — children used to play on the continental shelf until all their beaches disappeared, their homes washed away, and their favourite reefs were destroyed. Humans saw ice caps a mile thick roll over Manhattan and humans saw the wall of ice melt away too.
Things were so bad, at some point our ancestors waved good-bye to an entire species of hominid which had brains bigger than our own, and the vast forests of the Sahara desert turned to dust, the fish died, the rivers stopped flowing and the communities that existed for thousands of years were wiped out.
Teach the children what real climate change is. The more they know about prehistoric times and geology, the less vulnerable they’ll be to the scaremongering.
But sometime, some day, the ice sheets will return. We do need to talk about that.
REFERENCE
Austin J. Carter et al, Diminished Ross Ice Shelf and West Antarctic Ice Sheet during Last Interglacial warming, Nature Geoscience (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-026-01988-1