The Patagonian Ice Sheet was an ice sheet characterised by a wide variety of environments, including glaciolacustrine, land-terminating lowland lobes, high mountain glaciers and glaciomarine environments. It dammed large lakes that grew as it receded, which were an important control on ice dynamics. Here we present an overview of the variety of sediment-landform assemblages produced, and use these together with 1669 published ages to reconstruct Patagonian Ice Sheet evolution over the last 35,000 years, from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present day. We use these datasets to untangle the climatic and ice dynamical controls on ice recession, and find that current recession, driven by a persistent negative phase of the Southern Annular Mode, is exceptional within the Holocene.
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