Abstract

Aerosols from sea spray, windblown dust, biomass burning, volcanism, and industrial activities impact biogeochemical cycles and climate forcing. With their short lifetimes in the atmosphere, aerosol concentrations and deposition in the Polar Regions are dominated by regional (rather than global) sources, with long-range transport often implicit, resulting in large intra- and inter-annual variability in aerosol deposition. Arrays of high-time-resolution records with a broad range of analytes are required to document and understand past changes in aerosol concentrations, sources, and variability while providing adequate information for evaluating global circulation, snowpack radiation, and other models.

After briefly describing the state-of-the-art technology that makes possible efficient, very high-depth-resolution analyses of ice cores, we present and discuss recent findings from measurements of a broad range of aerosols and related source tracers in a developing array of ice cores from around the Arctic and Antarctic.