In a new paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters PhD student Anna Ruth Halberstadt, Dr Rob DeConto, former postdocs Ed Glasson, Doug Kowalewski and colleagues, model ice-sheet dynamics during a past warm period (the mid-Miocene) that is often used as a future analog due to elevated CO2 and warm temperatures. This work is unique in its approach to reconstruct past CO2 and the tectonic history of Antarctica, complex issues which remain highly debated. Instead of direct proxies, they incorporated all of the sparse paleoclimatic data from around Antarctica, both terrestrial and marine, and used those data to constrain our model and thereby make inferences about what CO2 and tectonic configurations were required to satisfy the geologic constraints. They reconstructed a thick but receded ice sheet under the warmest environmental conditions. Read more here.