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Public Documents
1
Reconstruction of temperature, accumulation rate, and layer thinning from an ice core...
Emma C. Kahle
and 13 more
June 02, 2021
Data from the South Pole ice core (SPC14) are used to constrain climate conditions and ice-flow-induced layer thinning for the last 54,000 years. Empirical constraints are obtained from the SPC14 ice and gas timescales, used to calculate annual-layer thickness and the gas-ice age difference (Δage), and from high-resolution measurements of water isotopes, used to calculate the water-isotope diffusion length. Both Δage and diffusion length depend on firn properties and therefore contain information about past temperature and snow-accumulation rate. A statistical inverse approach is used to obtain an ensemble of reconstructions of temperature, accumulation-rate, and thinning of annual layers in the ice sheet at the SPC14 site. The traditional water-isotope/temperature relationship is not used as a constraint; the results therefore provide an independent calibration of that relationship. The sensitivity of water isotopes to temperature is greater than previously assumed for East Antarctica. The temperature reconstruction yields a glacial-interglacial temperature change of 6.3±0.8°C at the South Pole.