During glacial periods of the Late Pleistocene, an abundance of proxy data demonstrates the existence of large and repeated millennial-scale warming episodes, known as Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) events. This ubiquitous feature of rapid glacial climate change can be extended back as far as 800,000 years before present (BP) in the ice core record, and has drawn broad attention within the science and policy-making communities alike. Many studies have been dedicated to investigating the underlying causes of these changes, but no coherent mechanism has yet been identified.