Late Glacial Climate History from Ice Cores

Ice cores contain information on climatic variations and their causes. Recent results obtained on the new deep ice core drilled in 1981 at Dye 3, South Greenland, in the frame of the US-Danish-Swiss Greenland Ice Sheet Program are: Comparison of the δ 180 variations in the Greenland ice cores with those in European lake carbonate exhibits strong similarities and provides time marks (13,000, 11,000, 10,000 B.P.) for the Late-Glacial section of the ice cores; CO2 concentration measurements in the occluded air indicate low (180–200 ppm) CO2 concentrations 30,000 to 15,000 B.P. and an increase to ca. 300 ppm around 13,000 B.P.,. The CO2 increase might reflect a change in the ocean circulation at the end of the last glaciation and could have contributed to the establishment of the Holocene environmental conditions; 10Be concentration measurements on samples covering the last 50,000 yaers show a correlation with δ 180, low δ 180 values corresponding to high 10Be concentrations (atoms per g of ice). Probably this mainly reflects changes in the rate of precipitation in the northern hemisphere.

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