Seminars

Seminars

Lecturer: Alla Belova
Date: 2007-05-10 10:00
Place: Aniara

Ice Core Research: Review and History of the Atmosphere from Ice Cores

Alla joined the European Research Course on Atmospheres (ERCA) that took place in France (Grenoble), 8/01-10/02, 2007. ERCA is a course for thesis students, scientists and engineers from universities, public research institutes and private research or industrial organizations. It is a high level international course on the Physics and Chemistry of the atmosphere of the Earth, the climate system and climate change, atmospheric pollution at different scales and human dimensions of environmental changes.

She will present one of the topics of this course about ice core. This presentation will be in a half popular form. Everybody is welcome.


Ice core research: general review. History of the atmosphere from ice cores.

Ice cores are an excellent way of finding out how the atmosphere has changed because climate signals and many forcing factors for climate are present in the same core. Their main disadvantage is that they are only available in the polar regions and at a few unusual sites elsewhere. Cores range from short ones designed to understand seasonal deposition up to the 3.6 km deep/400,000 year record from Vostok, Antarctica. Signals exist in the water isotopes, in the soluble and insoluble impurities, and in the trace gases trapped in bubbles. On short timescales, ice cores are the only means by which we know how greenhouse gas concentrations have altered in the last few centuries. On long timescales, ice cores have shown how temperature and greenhouse gases track each other through climatic cycles. They have also been responsible for revealing the very rapid switches in climate that occurred during the last glacial period.

Created 2007-04-25 10:56:26 by Uwe Raffalski
Last changed 2007-09-19 10:42:55 by Rick McGregor