Although understanding the response of ice sheet to a changing climate is a pressing issue of the century, our current knowledge of past ice-sheet changes remains limited by data sparsity. Over the last deglaciation, we understand global sea-level changes quite well, however, we know little about which ice sheets contributed meltwater at what times. I explore approaches that leverage non-traditional datasets to constrain past ice sheet and sea-level change over the last glacial cycle. For example, I revisit two topics of considerable debate: the expansion of the ice-free corridor between the two North American ice sheets and the flooding of the Bering Strait. I show it is possible to use observations of the Bering Strait flooding as sea-level indicators to fingerprint the timing and location of North American saddle deglaciation.
Next, I consider the role of ice sheet-solid Earth interactions on the deglaciation of the Ross Sea in West Antarctica. Since the Last Glacial Maximum, ice streams in the Ross Sea retreated hundreds of kilometers from the shelf break to their modern grounding line positions. I show that glacial isostatic adjustment causes a net retreat of stable grounding line positions from 20 ka to modern, with some ice streams experiencing up to 1000 km of stable grounding line zone retreat. This finding differs from prior studies that cite glacial isostatic adjustment as a stabilizing mechanism for marine-terminating ice streams, and underlines that solid Earth-ice sheet feedbacks are a function of both timescale and spatial scale of ice sheet unloading.