Ten ice-sheet models are used to study sensitivity of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to prescribed changes of surface mass balance, sub-ice-shelf melting and basal sliding. Results exhibit a large range in projected contributions to sea-level change. In most cases, the ice volume above flotation lost is linearly dependent on the strength of the forcing. Combinations of forcings can be closely approximated by linearly summing the contributions from single forcing experiments, suggesting that nonlinear feedbacks are modest. Our models indicate that Greenland is more sensitive than Antarctica to likely atmospheric changes in temperature and precipitation, while Antarctica is more sensitive to increased ice-shelf basal melting. An experiment approximating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s RCP8.5 scenario produces additional first-century contributions to sea level of 22.3 and 8.1 cm from Greenland and Antarctica, respectively, with a range among models of 62 and 14 cm, respectively. By 200 years, projections increase to 53.2 and 26.7 cm, respectively, with ranges of 79 and 43 cm. Linear interpolation of the sensitivity results closely approximates these projections, revealing the relative contributions of the individual forcings on the combined volume change and suggesting that total ice-sheet response to complicated forcings over 200 years can be linearized.

Studies of dislocation density evolution are fundamental to improved understanding in various areas of deformation mechanics. Recent advances in cross-correlation techniques, applied to electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) data have particularly shed light on geometrically necessary dislocation (GND) behavior. However, the framework is relatively computationally expensive—patterns are typically saved from the EBSD scan and analyzed offline. A better understanding of the impact of EBSD pattern degradation, such as binning, compression, and various forms of noise, is vital to enable optimization of rapid and low-cost GND analysis. This paper tackles the problem by setting up a set of simulated patterns that mimic real patterns corresponding to a known GND field. The patterns are subsequently degraded in terms of resolution and noise, and the GND densities calculated from the degraded patterns using cross-correlation ESBD are compared with the known values. Some confirmation of validity of the computational degradation of patterns by considering real pattern degradation is also undertaken. The results demonstrate that the EBSD technique is not particularly sensitive to lower levels of binning and image compression, but the precision is sensitive to Poisson-type noise. Some insight is also gained concerning effects of mixed patterns at a grain boundary on measured GND content.

In North America, terrestrial records of biodiversity and climate change that span Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage (MIS) 5 are rare. Where found, they provide insight into how the coupling of the ocean–atmosphere system is manifested in biotic and environmental records and how the biosphere responds to climate change. In 2010–2011, construction at Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village, Colorado (USA) revealed a nearly continuous, lacustrine/wetland sedimentary sequence that preserved evidence of past plant communities between ~140 and 55 ka, including all of MIS 5. At an elevation of 2705 m, the Ziegler Reservoir fossil site also contained thousands of well-preserved bones of late Pleistocene megafauna, including mastodons, mammoths, ground sloths, horses, camels, deer, bison, black bear, coyotes, and bighorn sheep. In addition, the site contained more than 26,000 bones from at least 30 species of small animals including salamanders, otters, muskrats, minks, rabbits, beavers, frogs, lizards, snakes, fish, and birds. The combination of macro- and micro-vertebrates, invertebrates, terrestrial and aquatic plant macrofossils, a detailed pollen record, and a robust, directly dated stratigraphic framework shows that high-elevation ecosystems in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado are climatically sensitive and varied dramatically throughout MIS 5.

High-resolution (or “cross-correlation”) electron backscatter diffraction analysis (HR-EBSD) utilizes cross-correlation techniques to determine relative orientation and distortion of an experimental electron backscatter diffraction pattern with respect to a reference pattern. The integrity of absolute strain and tetragonality measurements of a standard Si/SiGe material have previously been analyzed using reference patterns produced by kinematical simulation. Although the results were promising, the noise levels were significantly higher for kinematically produced patterns, compared with real patterns taken from the Si region of the sample. This paper applies HR-EBSD techniques to analyze lattice distortion in an Si/SiGe sample, using recently developed dynamically simulated patterns. The results are compared with those from experimental and kinematically simulated patterns. Dynamical patterns provide significantly more precision than kinematical patterns. Dynamical patterns also provide better estimates of tetragonality at low levels of distortion relative to the reference pattern; kinematical patterns can perform better at large values of relative tetragonality due to the ability to rapidly generate patterns relating to a distorted lattice. A library of dynamically generated patterns with different lattice parameters might be used to achieve a similar advantage. The convergence of the cross-correlation approach is also assessed for the different reference pattern types.