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The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica Dome ice core from Dome C (EDC) has allowed for the reconstruction of atmospheric CO 2 concentrations for the last 800,000 years. Here we revisit the oldest part of the EDC CO 2 record using different air extraction methods and sections of the core. For our established cracker system, we found an analytical artifact, which increases over the deepest 200 m and reaches 10.1 ± 2.4 ppm in the oldest/deepest part. The governing mechanism is not yet fully understood, but it is related to insufficient gas extraction in combination with ice relaxation during storage and ice structure. The corrected record presented here resolves partly -but not completely -the issue with a different correlation between CO 2 and Antarctic temperatures found in this oldest part of the records. In addition, we provide here an update of 800,000 years atmospheric CO 2 history including recent studies covering the last glacial cycle.

Little is known about the ocean temperature's long-term response to climate perturbations owing to limited observations and a lack of robust reconstructions. Although most of the anthropogenic heat added to the climate system has been taken up by the ocean up until now, its role in a century and beyond is uncertain. Here, using noble gases trapped in ice cores, we show that the mean global ocean temperature increased by 2.57 ± 0.24 degrees Celsius over the last glacial transition (20,000 to 10,000 years ago). Our reconstruction provides unprecedented precision and temporal resolution for the integrated global ocean, in contrast to the depth-, region-, organism- and season-specific estimates provided by other methods. We find that the mean global ocean temperature is closely correlated with Antarctic temperature and has no lead or lag with atmospheric CO, thereby confirming the important role of Southern Hemisphere climate in global climate trends. We also reveal an enigmatic 700-year warming during the early Younger Dryas period (about 12,000 years ago) that surpasses estimates of modern ocean heat uptake.

Important elements of natural climate variations during the last ice age are abrupt temperature increases over Greenland and related warming and cooling periods over Antarctica. Records from Antarctic ice cores have shown that the global carbon cycle also plays a role in these changes. The available data shows that atmospheric CO 2 follows closely temperatures reconstructed from Antarctic ice cores during these variations. Here, we present new high-resolution CO 2 data from Antarctic ice cores, which cover the period between 115,000 and 38,000 y before present. Our measurements show that also smaller Antarctic warming events have an imprint in CO 2 concentrations. Moreover, they indicate that during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5, the peak of millennial CO 2 variations lags the onset of Dansgaard/Oeschger warmings by 250 AE 190 y. During MIS 3, this lag increases significantly to 870 AE 90 y. Considerations of the ocean circulation suggest that the millennial variability associated with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) undergoes a mode change from MIS 5 to MIS 4 and 3. Ocean carbon inventory estimates imply that during MIS 3 additional carbon is derived from an extended mass of carbon-enriched Antarctic Bottom Water. The absence of such a carbon-enriched water mass in the North Atlantic during MIS 5 can explain the smaller amount of carbon released to the atmosphere after the Antarctic temperature maximum and, hence, the shorter lag. Our new data provides further constraints for transient coupled carbon cycleclimate simulations during the entire last glacial cycle.abrupt climate change | CO2-temperature phasing | ice age variability | paleoclimate | greenhouse gas T he climate of the last glacial period is characterized by low global mean temperatures and a number of interhemispheric variations on time scales of several millennia. In the northern hemisphere, in particular on the Greenland ice sheet, large and very rapid temperature jumps of up to 15°C within a few decades, followed by more steady decreases of temperature, have been identified from ice core analyses (1, 2). 25 of these so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events have been found during the last glacial period. For each of these events, an associated Antarctic temperature variation has been also documented in Antarctic ice cores (Antarctic Isotope Maximum [AIM] events) (3). Antarctic temperatures increase siteadily when Greenland is in the cold phase and slowly decrease following the abrupt temperature increase in Greenland during a DO event. This behavior is explained by the concept of an oceanic thermal bipolar seesaw, where variations in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and associated changes in heat transport across the equator to the North Atlantic modulate the southern and northern hemisphere temperatures during each of these events (4).Previous reconstructions of atmospheric CO 2 concentrations during these millennial-scale variations show that CO 2 varies largely in parallel with the major AIM events (...

We present new 13 C measurements of atmospheric CO 2 covering the last glacial/interglacial cycle, complementing previous records covering Terminations I and II. Most prominent in the new record is a significant depletion in 13 C(atm) of 0.5‰ occurring during marine isotope stage (MIS) 4, followed by an enrichment of the same magnitude at the beginning of MIS 3. Such a significant excursion in the record is otherwise only observed at glacial terminations, suggesting that similar processes were at play, such as changing sea surface temperatures, changes in marine biological export in the Southern Ocean (SO) due to variations in aeolian iron fluxes, changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, upwelling of deep water in the SO, and long-term trends in terrestrial carbon storage. Based on previous modeling studies, we propose constraints on some of these processes during specific time intervals. The decrease in 13 C(atm) at the end of MIS 4 starting approximately 64 kyr B.P. was accompanied by increasing [CO 2 ]. This period is also marked by a decrease in aeolian iron flux to the SO, followed by an increase in SO upwelling during Heinrich event 6, indicating that it is likely that a large amount of 13 C-depleted carbon was transferred to the deep oceans previously, i.e., at the onset of MIS 4. Apart from the upwelling event at the end of MIS 4 (and potentially smaller events during Heinrich events in MIS 3), upwelling of deep water in the SO remained reduced until the last glacial termination, whereupon a second pulse of isotopically light carbon was released into the atmosphere.

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[1] Polar ice cores are unique archives for ancient air. However, a loss of air due to molecular diffusion during storage could affect the composition of the remaining air. We formulate a model with a high spatial resolution (1 mm) calculating the loss of N 2 , O 2 and CO 2 in pure clathrate ice in order to determine which layers of an ice core are affected by significant changes in the CO 2 concentration and the d(O 2 / N 2 ) ratio for storage durations up to 38 years. The results agree with experimental d(O 2 /N 2 ) measurements at ice core pieces performed after different storage durations. Additionally, the calculations confirm the importance of the storage temperature and show that the CO 2 concentration is less affected than that of d(O 2 /N 2 ). Furthermore, guidelines for ice core sample preparation are provided in dependence of storage duration and temperature. Citation: Bereiter, B., J. Schwander, D. Lüthi, and T. F. Stocker (2009), Change in CO 2 concentration and O 2 /N 2 ratio in ice cores due to molecular diffusion, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L05703,

International audienceAn important share of paleoclimatic information is buried within the lowermost layers of deep ice cores. Because improving our records further back in time is one of the main challenges in the near future, it is essential to judge how deep these records remain unaltered, since the proximity of the bedrock is likely to interfere both with the recorded temporal sequence and the ice properties. In this paper, we present a multiparametric study (δD-δ18Oice , δ18Oatm , total air content, CO2 , CH4 , N2O, dust, high-resolution chemistry , ice texture) of the bottom 60 m of the EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) Dome C ice core from central Antarctica. These bottom layers were subdivided into two distinct facies: the lower 12 m showing visible solid inclusions (basal dispersed ice facies) and the upper 48 m, which we will refer to as the " basal clean ice facies ". Some of the data are consistent with a pristine paleocli-matic signal, others show clear anomalies. It is demonstrated that neither large-scale bottom refreezing of subglacial water , nor mixing (be it internal or with a local basal end term from a previous/initial ice sheet configuration) can explain the observed bottom-ice properties. We focus on the high-resolution chemical profiles and on the available remote sensing data on the subglacial topography of the site to propose a mechanism by which relative stretching of the bottom-ice sheet layers is made possible, due to the progressively confining effect of subglacial valley sides