Houston -- U.S. and British scientists say the current warming and widespread loss of glacial ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is unprecedented.
"At no time during the last 14,000 years was there a period of climate warming and loss of ice as large and regionally synchronous as that we are now witnessing in the Antarctic Peninsula," said Steve Bohaty of Britain's National Oceanography Center.
Bohaty said the findings are based on a detailed analysis of the thickest Holocene sediment core yet drilled in the Antarctic Peninsula.
As part of a 2005 research cruise aboard a U.S. icebreaker, he and his colleagues drilled through sediments to bedrock at Maxwell Bay, a fjord at the Antarctic Peninsula's northwest tip.
