Abstract
Establishing precise age-depth relationships of high-alpine ice cores is essential in order to deduce conclusive paleoclimatic information from these archives. Radiocarbon dating of carbonaceous aerosol particles incorporated in such glaciers is a promising tool to gain absolute ages, especially from the deepest parts where conventional methods are commonly inapplicable. In this study, we present a new validation for a published 14C dating method for ice cores. Previously 14C-dated horizons of organic material from the Juvfonne ice patch in central southern Norway (61.676 ° N, 8.354 ° E) were used as reference dates for adjacent ice layers, which were 14C dated based on their particulate organic carbon (POC) fraction. Multiple measurements were carried out on 3 sampling locations within the ice patch featuring modern to multimillennial ice. The ages obtained from the analyzed samples were in agreement with the given age estimates. In addition to previous validation work, this independent verification gives further confidence that the investigated method provides the actual age of the ice. DOI: 10.2458/azu_js_rc.55.16320
Highlights
Glaciers and ice sheets comprise valuable information about past climatic and environmental conditions on Earth
In the deepest parts of a glacier, where thinning of annual layers does not allow for conventional annual layer counting (ALC) on seasonally varying parameters (Thompson et al 1990) and where the application of ice flow models is often hampered by the complex small-scale topography of bedrock (Lüthi and Funk 2001), other techniques are required to establish a precise age-depth relation
We developed a 14C method for dating ice-core samples utilizing the ubiquitous trace amounts of carbonaceous aerosol particles embedded in the ice matrix and applied it to natural ice samples from various glaciated regions all over the globe including some in-depth investigations of basal ice-core sections (Jenk et al 2009; Kellerhals et al 2010; Wientjes et al 2012; Herren et al 2013)
Summary
Glaciers and ice sheets comprise valuable information about past climatic and environmental conditions on Earth. We present a new validation for a published 14C dating method for ice cores. Micro-amounts of particulate organic carbon (POC) were extracted from clear ice samples from a Norwegian ice patch and were 14C dated with our method.
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