Abstract
Under the potential to reconstruct the past climatic and atmospheric conditions from a deep ice core in the coastal Antarctic site (Styx Glacier), an 8.84 m long firn core (73°50.975′ S, 163°41.640′ E; 1623 m a.s.l.) was initially studied to propose a reliable age scale for the local estimation of snow accumulation rate. The seasonal variations of δ18O, methanesulfonic acid (MSA) and non-sea-salt sulfate (nssSO42-) were used for the firn core dating and revealed 25 annual peaks (from 1990 to 2014) with volcanic sulfate signal. The observed declining trend in annual accumulation rate with a mean value of 146 ± 60 kg m-2 a-1 is likely to be linked to the changes of sea-ice extent in the Ross Sea region. Moreover, the temporal variation of the annual mean δ18O, an annual flux of MSA and nssSO42- also likely to be under the influence of ice-covered and open water area. This study suggests a potential to recover past changes in an oceanic environment and will be useful for the interpretation of the long ice core drilled at the same site.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 916-926 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Journal of Glaciology |
Volume | 66 |
Issue number | 260 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2017R1D1A1A09000732) and KOPRI research grant (PE20190). We thank Dr. Elizabeth Morris for sharing the results of firn densification models and comments on the manuscript. We are also grateful to the Italian PNRA (Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide) project for providing meteorological data from Lola AWS ( http://www.climantartide.it ) and the ERA-Interim dataset from the ECMWF. We appreciate the scientific editor and two anonymous reviewers, whose comments led to significant improvements.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Keywords
- Annual layer counting
- Styx Glacier
- ionic species
- snow accumulation
- stable water isotopes