The Cryosphere Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2018-8 Manuscript under review for journal The Cryosphere Discussion started: 16 February 2018 c Author(s) 2018. CC BY 4.0 License. Modelling last glacial cycle ice dynamics in the Alps Julien Seguinot1, Guillaume Jouvet1, Matthias Huss1, Martin Funk1, Susan Ivy-Ochs2, and Frank Preusser3 1Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology, ETH Zürich, Switzerland 2Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics, ETH Zürich, Switzerland 3Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Freiburg, Germany Correspondence to: J. Seguinot (
[email protected]) Abstract. The European Alps, cradle of pioneer glacial studies, are one of the regions where geological markers of past glaciations are most abundant and well-studied. Such conditions make the region ideal for testing numerical glacier models based on simplified ice flow physics against field-based reconstructions, and vice-versa. 5 Here, we use the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM) to model the entire last glacial cycle (120–0 ka) in the Alps, using horizontal resolutions of 2 and 1 km and up to 576 processors. Climate forcing is derived using present-day climate data from WorldClim and the ERA-Interim reanalysis, and time-dependent temperature offsets from multiple palaeo-climate proxies, among which only the EPICA ice core record yields glaciation during marine oxygen isotope stages 4 (69–62 ka) and 2 (34– 18 ka) spatially and temporally consistent with the geological reconstructions, while the other records used result in excessive 10 early glacial cycle ice cover and a late Last Glacial Maximum. Despite the low variability of this Antarctic-based climate forcing, our simulation depicts a highly dynamic ice sheet, showing that Alpine glaciers may have advanced many times over the foreland during the last glacial cycle.