Landslide puts climate change link in a loop

The well known Waiho Loop moraine on South Island, New Zealand, has long been a global poster child for abrupt climate change and has been interpreted as a consequence of  a climate reversal at the end of the last ice age. It has variously been attributed to Younger Dryas or Antarctic Cold Reversal cooling and used as evidence of both synchronous and asynchronous climate linkage between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. 

Work by Dan Santamaria Tovar, Jamie Shulmeister and Tim Davies of UC Geological Sciences published in an AOP (Advance Online Publication) paper in Nature Geoscience this week, reinterprets the Loop as the product of a large landslide rather than a climatic event. With this revision the scale and nature of climate change in NZ at the end of the last ice age needs reconsideration. To see the article please go to the link at Nature Geosciences http://dx.doi.org