The Record of Aerosol Deposited Species in Ice Cores, and Problems of Interpretation

Ice cores have now become established as one of the primary archives of paleoclimatic information, covering timescales from seasonal up to 100,000 years or more. In the polar ice sheets, where there is little or no melting, snow layers build up year by year. Included in them are samples of the atmosphere: trace gases in air bubbles, particles and adsorbed gases, and the water molecules themselves. By drilling into the ice at suitable places, we can collect cores that give profiles of chemical content and physical properties of the ice. These are then used to infer the state of the atmosphere in the past.