An Unsurprising Discovery

A correspondent sent me THIS LINK. It is based on this ACADEMIC PAPER in Nature. The Nature paper concentrates on the history of the breakup of the ice shelves which fringed the British-Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS). The BBC article concentrates on the scratches the icebergs breaking off from the ice shelves left on the sea floor. 

It has always seemed to me that such scratches would inevitably be found some time; - there was an ice sheet; icebergs would be spawned; icebergs would leave sea bed scratches. So it is nice that there presence has been proved.

The paper in Nature uses the scratches to detail how the BIIS retreated and uses the data to model how the Antarctic Ice Sheet might break up.

Icebergs calved in the Witch Ground Basin would drift eastwards towards the Norwegian Channel before being routed northwards towards the continental shelf edge. The isostatically-corrected bathymetry of the central North Sea at 20 ka is from Bradley et al. 60, with bathymetric depth contours displayed every 25 m. Colored stippled lines represent the modeled ice margins of the last British-Irish (BIIS) and Fennoscandian (FIS) ice sheets at timeslices between 20 ka and 18 ka from Clark et al. 40. NCIS—Norwegian Channel Ice Stream.