Ice Sheets Twice Today's Volume Melted Catastrophically

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He walks through the scale of the ice sheets at their maximum extent, roughly 14,000 to 20,000 years ago. Double the height of the new World Trade Center building, which stands at 1,776 feet, and you still haven't reached the thickness of the ice that covered North America and northwestern Europe. The volume was staggering: more than twice all the ice that exists on Earth today, including Antarctica, Greenland, and every mountain glacier combined. When that ice melted, it didn't disappear gradually like the glaciers we've watched recede over the past century and a half. It melted catastrophically, releasing enormous volumes of meltwater across the continents. The evidence for this is written into the landscape itself, in the scablands, the channeled terrain, and the sediment deposits that mark where those floodwaters moved. Understanding the scale and the speed of that melt is essential to understanding how dramatically climate can shift within a geologically brief window of time.