Reconstruction of climate history from polar ice sheets
Human activities will have serious impact on the global environmental system and will change the earths climate in the future. To predict the climate change of the earth reliable, the knowledge of the climate history of the past and the forcing mechanisms of natural climate variability is essential.
Polar ice sheets of the Arctic and Antarctica are unique climate archives, preserving the climate history of the past in high temporal resolution back to 800 000 years and possible beyond. Ice core analysis gives access to a wide range of atmospheric and climatic parameters such as temperature, precipitation, trace gases, aerosols and mineral dust which are essential for the reconstruction of paleoclimate.
Paleaoclimate research at the glaciology department of AWI:
One of the main fields of research of the AWI glaciology department concerns the reconstruction of paleotemperature, snow accumulation (precipitation) and the concentration of atmospheric aerosols and mineral dust and their temporal and spatial variability on the Greenland ice sheet and in Antarctica
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The stable water isotopes (18O and D) in precipitation are the basis for the reconstruction of paleotemperature due to the empirical linear relationship between mean annual air temperature and the mean isotopic composition of deposited snow.
Investigations of anual snow accumulation provide information about changes in precipitation rates in the past and their correlation with changes in atmospheric circulation pattern. Furthermore the accumulation data will be used as one of the essential input data for calculating the mass balance of the ice sheets.
Projects
- Investigations on spatial and temporal variability of accumulation, isotopic composition, and concentration of aerosols and minaeral dust of snow and ice during in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica. These data respent important input data for the EPICA Dronning Maud Land ice core. Combarable data has been previously collected for central and northern Greenland within the AWI North Greenland Traverse.
- Reconstruction of climate history for the last up to 800 000 years using deep ice cores from Greenland (GRIP, NGRIP) and Antarctica (EPICA, Talos Dome). A synthesis of the EPICA ice cores and marine sediment records is the goal of the EU project EPICA-MIS.
- Coastal ice cores in Antarctica providing regional information on climate and environmental changes on annual scales up to the last 40000 years. These studies represent a contribution to the international ice core framework IPICS
Participants
Dr. Hubertus Fischer, Dr. Hans Oerter, Dr. Sepp Kipfstuhl, Dr. Rolf Weller, Anna Wegner, Birthe Twarloh, Fernando Valero Delgado.
Cooperating institutes
- Institut fuer Umweltphysik der Universitaet Heidelberg, Germany
- Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland
- Glaciology Group, Dept. of Geophysics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- GSF-Forschungszentrum, Institut für Hydrologie, Neuherberg, Germany
- Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Geophysique de’l Environnement, CNRS-UJF, Grenoble, France (http://www-lgge.ujf-grenoble.fr)
- Department of Environmental Sciences, University Ca’ Foscari of Venice,
- Department of Chemistry, University of Florence, Italy
- EAWAG, Dübendorf, Switzerland
- Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE/IPSL), CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Gif sur Yvette, France
- Environmental Sciences Department, University of Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy
- Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden.
- British Antarctic Survey, High Cross, Cambridge, UK
- Departement Geografie, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium
- Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø, Norway.
- ENEA, Roma, Italy
- Utrecht University, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
- Department of Geological, Environmental and Marine Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
- Departement des Sciences de la Terre, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
