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Researchers drilled bedrock cores near Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Today, those sites sit under about 35 to 40 meters of ice. But during the earlier Holocene--the current warm period that began about 11,700 years ago-- the ice was only 2 to 7 meters thick. For thousands of years, it held at these low levels before thickening again. The paper calls this "reversible ice sheet thinning." The region thinned before, naturally, then recovered. The physical record is littered with examples of great thinning and thickening. This is not unprecedented. Nor is it irreversible.