Does anybody know of a source where sea ice thickness grids for 6.000 an 21.000 years ago can be downloaded for modeling? I only find resouces for land ice thickness but not sea ice.
Hey Alexander, I recently tried to find these layers but without success. I had a work around for my situation wherein I was instead able to proxy persistent sea ice cover during the LGM. This was done by modelling distributions in Arctic endemic seaweed and using SST of the coldest ice free month, a data layer available through MARSPEC. Because I was modelling seaweeds at the northern boundary where the ice free window is the shortest, approaching freezing point, MESS output from maxent proxied perennial ice cover since this was outside the training range for the datasets provided (frozen year round). I then superimposed the MESS output onto my species distributions to ensure I was not considering habitat suitability in areas of persistent ice cover (since in the case of seaweeds that would push out populations).
I realize that is not exactly ice thickness values, but my thought process was that this variable was proxied in part by SST. Of course, if considering an organism that lives under the ice year round this will not be useful. I contacted several research groups to try and find paleo layers for sea ice thickness, my best lead was the CCMAR group who had sea ice extent going back through time, but my impression was that it would take some work to develop the layers at the desired time stamps (6 ka and 21 ka) and I am unsure as to the spatial resolution of the layers.
Best of luck, I'd be interested if these layers do in fact exist. If they do, they are not easy to find!