Diffusivity and Solubility of H₂ in Ice Ih: Implications for the Behavior of H₂ in Polar Ice

Abstract

The polar ice sheets contain a unique archive of ancient air that can be used to reconstruct atmospheric composition on timescales from decades to hundreds of thousands of years. Reconstructing paleoatmospheric trace gas levels requires an understanding of how trace gases are incorporated into the ice sheet and how they evolve in time as a function of burial depth and temperature (e.g., Etheridge et al., 1996Etheridge et al., , 1998. Gas molecules with small kinetic diameters (<3.60 Å) are highly permeable in ice, and information about the solubility and diffusivity of such gases in ice is needed to develop physical models of gas transport in the ice sheet (

Risk of the hydrogen economy for atmospheric methane

“…First, H 2 containment may remain an issue even as technologies progress. The high diffusivity of the small H 2 molecule has already challenged the scientific community's ability to measure the H 2 concentration in the atmosphere 50 and in the firn air of ice sheets 51 . Second, while more field-based estimates of H 2 losses are needed, there is currently no commercially available sensing technology able to detect small H 2 leaks at the ppb level 48 .…”

The drag effect of air bubbles on triple junction migration of pure ice

“…These bubbles contain the air that existed on Earth thousands of years ago (Severinghaus et al 1998). Paleoclimatologists use the bubbles to study changes in the com-position of the air in past times and relate them to current atmospheric changes (Guillet et al 2021, Patterson and Saltzman 2021, Seltzer et al 2021, Severinghaus and Brook 1999.…”