The role of dust in glacial–interglacial cycles

In this work, the possible climate effects of variations in dust flux during the last six glacial cycles (575–0 ka before present (BP)) are investigated. While most past studies investigated the role of dust in equilibrium or in relatively short transient experiments, in the present study, we conduct million-year simulations using a two-dimensional model. Our results show that accounting for increases in atmospheric dust strongly affects the mean annual surface temperature, and more importantly affects the evolution of the ice sheets. We found a similar cooling trend as previous studies due to the direct radiative forcing by dust. We also found that the effect of dust on snow albedo has a significant impact on the speed of ice-sheet retreat. Furthermore, we found that dust radiative forcing emphasizes the asymmetry of the glacial cycles, especially in the cycles that were symmetric in the reference simulation, a finding that could only be observed with multi-glacial cycle simulations.