A brief history of ice core science over the last 50 yr

Abstract

Abstract. For about 50 yr, ice cores have provided a wealth of information about past climatic and environmental changes. Ice cores from Greenland, Antarctica and other glacier-covered regions now encompass a variety of time scales. However, the longer time scales (e.g. at least back to the Last Glacial period) are covered by deep ice cores, the number of which is still very limited: seven from Greenland, with only one providing an undisturbed record of a part of the last interglacial period, and a dozen from Antarctica, with the longest record covering the last 800 000 yr. This article aims to summarize this successful adventure initiated by a few pioneers and their teams and to review key scientific results by focusing on climate (in particular water isotopes) and climate-related (e.g. greenhouse gases) reconstructions. Future research is well taken into account by the four projects defined by IPICS. However, it remains a challenge to get an intact record of the Last Interglacial in Greenland and to extend the Antarctic record through the mid-Pleistocene transition, if possible back to 1.5 Ma.

Glacial–interglacial changes in H<sub>2</sub><sup>18</sup>O, HDO and deuterium excess – results from the fully coupled ECHAM5/MPI-OM Earth system model

“…Their findings are based on the use of an empirical relation between dex and relative humidity together with ERA-Interim reanalysis data (Dee et al, 2011) to globally predict dex values of evaporation fluxes over the ocean. Their results are partly supported by recent monitoring studies of water vapour isotopic composition, which have demonstrated a strong imprint of source humidity in the North Atlantic on the high deuterium excess of Arctic water vapour (Bonne et al, 2014;Steen-Larsen et al, 2014b, 2013.…”

“…They have been successfully used to describe past climate changes for more than 30 years. For example, water stable isotopes (hereafter expressed in a δ notation as δ 18 O and δD, with respect to the Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water standard V-SMOW, if not stated otherwise) have been measured routinely over the past decades in polar ice cores (Jouzel, 2013) and more recently also in non-polar ice cores (Hoffmann et al, 2003;Thompson et al, 1998). To a first order, δ 18 O and δD in polar ice cores are used for past temperature reconstructions over the past glacial-interglacial cycles (Jouzel et 18 O, HDO and deuterium excess al., 2007;NEEM community members, 2013).…”

Volcanic ash in bare ice south of Sør Rondane Mountains, Antarctica: geochemistry, rock magnetism and nondestructive magnetic detection with SQUID gradiometer

“…The importance of ice core records to reconstruct climate in Late Pleistocene to Holocene is increasing for the past decades (e.g., Jouzel 2013). The climate archives of ice in Antarctica and Greenland have been retrieved by ice coring projects such as Dome Fuji (e.g., Watanabe et al 1999), EPICA-Dome C (e.g., Landais et al 2012), Vostok (e.g., Bender et al 2006).…”

Comment on “Quaternary glaciations: from observations to theories” by D. Paillard [Quat. Sci. Rev. 107 (2015), 11–24]

“…Therefore, according to Paillard (2015) CO 2 variations are not the consequence of, but a cause of global climatic changes in the Pleistocene. Because CO 2 fluctuations, detected in Antarctic ice cores (e.g., Petit et al, 1999;Jouzel, 2013), are similar to temperature changes in the Antarctic and d 18 О variations in deep sea cores, the changes in CO 2 records have the same orbital periodicities as in the above-mentioned palaeoclimatic archives. In this case, one can easily explain the existence of orbital periodicities in ice and deep sea core records by using a simple linear mechanism for transformation of the CO 2 signal into climatic changes.…”