The Deposition Of Particles and Gases to Ice Sheets

The glacial record has proven to be a most valuable source of information about climate change, major geologic events, and variations in global cycling of chemical species (Barnola et al., 1987; Dansgaard et al., 1989; Mayewski et al., 1990; Taylor et al., 1993). This information has been obtained by noting variations in chemical concentrations and in ice properties with depth in ice sheets worldwide (Delmas and Legrand, 1989). Virtually all of the chemical constituents found in the world’s glaciers, aside from those near bedrock, originally came from the atmosphere. Yet published studies of ice core data have seldom incorporated information about the atmosphere or air-to-snow transfer into their interpretations.