Dansgaard-Oeschger events
Greenland warms by 10 degrees in a few decades, twenty-five separate times.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 103 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 3 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Greenland ice cores record a series of abrupt warmings in which temperatures jump 8 to 16 degrees Celsius within decades, hold for centuries to millennia, then decline gradually before the next. Twenty-five are counted through the last glacial. They are tied to reorganisations of Atlantic overturning circulation and sea ice, and they show the climate system has modes it can flip between on human timescales — the single most unsettling result to come out of ice core science.