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A challenge for testing mechanisms of past climate change is the precise correlation of palaeoclimate records. Here, through climate modelling and the alignment of terrestrial, ice and marine ¹⁴C and ¹⁰Be records, the authors show that Southern Ocean freshwater hosing can trigger global change.

A 580,000-year cave record from southern Nevada reveals how temperature, ice sheets, and summer insolation influenced the southwest United States’ unique climate history over the last six glacial-interglacial cycles.

Isotopic evidence from ice cores indicates that preindustrial-era geological methane emissions were lower than previously thought, suggesting that present-day emissions of methane from fossil fuels are underestimated.

Ice-core data show that extreme iceberg discharge events in the North Atlantic had no detectable impact on Greenland temperatures but are synchronous with abrupt acceleration of Antarctic warming.

Abrupt changes in atmospheric methane through the last deglaciation were largely the result of tropical sources responding to shifting rainfall patterns, according to a comparison of precisely dated ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica.

Abrupt glacial climate changes were slowly communicated between hemispheres by oceanic heat transport. Ice core data point to more rapid atmospheric teleconnections linking the North Atlantic, tropics, and southern storm track.

Reconstruction of the Eemian interglacial from the new NEEM ice core shows that in spite of a climate warmer by eight degrees Celsius in Northern Greenland than that of the past millennium, the ice here was only a few hundred metres lower than its present level.

A new ice core from West Antarctica shows that, during the last ice age, abrupt Northern Hemisphere climate variations were followed two centuries later by a response in Antarctica, suggesting an oceanic propagation of the climate signal to the Southern Hemisphere high latitudes.

Carbon dioxide and methane records from a West Antarctic ice core show that although gradual variations in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the last glacial termination are linked to changes in Antarctic temperature, the concentration underwent three abrupt, centennial-scale changes related to sudden climate changes in the Northern Hemisphere.

Palaeodata resolution and dating limit the study of the sequence of changes across Earth during past abrupt warmings. Here, the authors show tight decadal-scale coupling between Greenland climate, North Atlantic sea ice and atmospheric circulation during these past events using two highly resolved ice-core records.

The integration of a micrometre-sized magnet with a semiconductor device has enabled the individual manipulation of two single electron spins. This approach may provide a scalable route for quantum computing with electron spins confined in quantum dots.

Radiocarbon dating of sediment cores and ice-penetrating radar observations are used to demonstrate that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has not retreated progressively during the Holocene epoch, but has instead showed periods of retreat and re-advance.

An annually resolved ice-core record from West Antarctica indicates that warming driven by local insolation resulting from sea-ice decline began in that region about 2,000 years before warming in East Antarctica, reconciling two alternative explanations for deglacial warming in the Southern Hemisphere.

A firn layer covers the Earth’s ice sheets. This Review outlines techniques to observe and model changes in firn properties and meltwater retention to understand how this firn layer will respond to climate change.

Analysis of deep-sea coral boron isotope data, as a proxy for pH and thus CO₂ chemistry, provides evidence of CO₂ storage in the deep Southern Ocean during the last ice age, and its rapid release on millennial to centennial timescales during deglaciation.

A reconstruction of changes in ocean oxygenation throughout the last glacial cycle shows that respired carbon was removed from the deep Southern Ocean during deglaciation and Antarctic warm events, consistent with a prominent role of reduced iron fertilization and enhanced ocean ventilation, modifying atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 80,000 years.