Abstract
A quantitative analysis of the total concentrations of Al and Na in the Antarctic ice sheet during the past 340 kyr was performed by applying the acid digestion method to the Dome Fuji ice core. Atmospheric fluxes of mineral and sea-salt aerosol to Dome Fuji were calculated from the total concentration. The average fluxes of mineral aerosol to Dome Fuji in the periods of glacial maximum, 18.6 ± 10.1 mg·m–2·yr–1, were larger than the value in the interglacial periods, 3.77 ± 2.20 mg·m–2·yr–1. Conversely, the fluxes of sea-salt have no significant difference between the average value of glacial maximum, 130 ± 55 mg·m–2·yr–1, and that of interglacial, 111 ± 54 mg·m–2·yr–1. The results obtained in this study suggest that the variation of mineral aerosol flux in Dome Fuji, together with climate change, was much larger than that of sea-salt aerosol flux. This result may have occurred because the variety in the intensity of the source and transport during the glacial-interglacial cycle is more significant for mineral aerosol than that for sea-salt aerosol.
Highlights
Atmospheric aerosols have controlled the energy balance of the Earth through radiative forcing [1,2]
Profiles of the concentration of total Al (t-Al) and total Na (t-Na) of the DF1 core for the past 340 kyr are shown in Figure 1 together with the profile of δ18O [17]
We can consider that t-Al is a proxy of mineral particles in the ice core; we must be aware that t-Na is derived from sea-salt in addition to mineral particles
Summary
Atmospheric aerosols have controlled the energy balance of the Earth through radiative forcing [1,2]. To quantitatively clarify the role of aerosols in past climate changes, analyses of mineral and sea-salt particles in ice cores obtained in the Arctic and Antarctic were performed [5]. We measured the total concentration of metallic elements by applying a full-digestion analysis to the ice core obtained from Dome Fuji, Antarctica. Analysis of the concentration of soluble ion species [18], the volcanic layers [19], the number of microparticles [20], and the chemical composition of salt particles in the DF1 core [21,22,23] was conducted for clarifying changes in the Earth’s climate and environment. We measured the total concentration of Al and Na in the DF1 core, and we present the record of atmospheric fluxes of mineral and sea-salt aerosols occurring over the past 340 kyr
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