The first, dubbed PONAM (for POlar North Atlantic Margins) concentrated on the western side of the Barents Sea. These efforts involved more than 50 scientists from seven European countries, including the four of us. To resolve the issue, the European Science Foundation mounted back-to-back research programs to gather new geological evidence in the vicinity of the former ice sheets in the Eurasian Arctic. Another obstacle was the paucity of reliable observations from this remote and inhospitable region. The problem was partly that the geological record in the Arctic can be difficult to read and thus open to misinterpretation. Contradictory views sparred in the literature. Whereas some saw evidence for a massive, 3.5-kilometer-thick ice sheet over the whole of northern Europe and Siberia at the height of the last ice age (known to geologists as the Last Glacial Maximum, or LGM), others disputed this appraisal, preferring to believe that there was virtually no ice at all on the seafloor to the north of the Norwegian and Russian mainlands. By the mid-1980s, however, the interpretation of the geological observations varied enormously. Many earth scientists took heed and applied their specialties to the investigation, and their work soon began to reveal the glacial history of the Eurasian Arctic. Mercer understood the task his observation demanded: To gauge whether the west Antarctic ice sheet is truly in danger of breaking up, scientists must look for clues at the other side of the Earth, in the geological remnants of the former ice sheets that covered northern Eurasia.
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