Bartosz Kurjanski

The Ural Mountains form a natural border dividing the East European plain from West Siberia, both of which experienced extensive glaciations during the Pleistocene and were periodically occupied by the Barents-Kara ice sheet (Mangerud et al. 1999; Ehlers et al. 2011; Svendsen et al. 2014, 2022a, b; Batchelor et al. 2019).

Marine-based ice sheets are susceptible to much faster retreat, or even collapse, than their land-terminating counterparts. This potential ice-sheet instability was first recognized by (Mercer 1978) in West Antarctica, where the rising air and ocean water temperatures can lead to thinning and an accelerated retreat of a large part of the ice sheet that currently is grounded in the submarine setting on the continental shelf.