Science Highlights: Ice Core Science 21 Dating ice cores JAKOB SCHWANDER Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland;
[email protected] Introduction 200 [ppb An accurate chronology is the ba- NO 100 3 ] sis for a meaningful interpretation - 80 ] of any climate archive, including ice 2 0 O 2 40 [ppb cores. Until now, the oldest ice re- H 0 200 Dust covered from a continuous core is [ppb 100 that from Dome Concordia, Antarc- 2 ] ] tica, with an estimated age of over -1 1.6 0 Sm 1.2 µ 800,000 years (EPICA Community [ Conduct. 0.8 160 [ppb Members, 2004). But the recently SO 80 4 2 recovered cores from near bedrock ] 60 - ] at Kohnen Station (Dronning Maud + 40 0 Na Land, Antarctica) and Dome Fuji [ppb 20 40 [ 0 Ca (Antarctica) compete for the longest ppb 2 20 + climatic record. With the recovery of ] 80 0 + more and more ice cores, the task of ] 4 establishing a good common chro- 40 [ppb NH nology has become increasingly im- 0 portant for linking the fi ndings from 1425 1425 .5 1426 1426 .5 1427 the different records. Moreover, in Depth [m] order to create a comprehensive Fig. 1: Seasonal variations of impurities in early Holocene ice from the North GRIP ice core. picture of past climate dynamics, it Summer layers are indicated by grey lines. is crucial to aim at a common chro- al., 1993, Rasmussen et al., 2006). is assessed with such a model, then nology for all paleo-records. Here Ideally the counting uncertainty is one can construct a chronology of the different methods for dating ice on the order of 1%.