Particle on ice: characterising naoparticles in deep ice cores as paleoclimatic indicators

Objective

Mineral dust trapped in Antarctic ice is key to improving our understanding the past climate of our planet and predicting future conditions. Dust encodes information in the form of its spatial distribution, size, elemental composition and concentration, and can be used to determine climatic, environmental and atmospheric processes. The discovery of 1.5 million year old ice has sparked new hope to better understand major paleoclimatic events. However, post-depositional effects and the compact nature of deep ice, where centuries are compressed into centimetres, obscure our view into the past. Without overcoming these technical challenges, our understanding of major climatic events is limited. This project aims to improve our interpretations by combining two state-of-the-art techniques, laser ablation micro-sampling of ice and multi-elemental single particle analysis. This will provide us with the tools to map dust particle properties in two dimensions and target sharp ice grain boundaries that host a range of impurities. By interrogating ice-impurity interactions at the micrometre resolutions of laser ablation we will provide the required tools to fully exploit the knowledge contained within mineral dust proxies.