Publication Date:
2014-08-22
Description:
Ice cores are exceptional archives which allow us to reconstruct a wealth of climatic parameters as well as past atmospheric composition over the last 800 ka in Antarctica. Inferring the variations of past accumulation rate in polar regions is essential both for documenting past climate and for ice core chronology. On the East Antarctic plateau, the accumulation rate is so small that annual layers cannot be identified and accumulation rate is mainly deduced from the water isotopic composition assuming constant temporal relationships between temperature, water isotopic composition and accumulation rate. Such assumption leads to large uncertainties on the reconstructed past accumulation rate. Here, we use high resolution beryllium-10 (10Be) as an alternative tool for inferring past accumulation rate for the EPICA Dome C ice core, in East Antarctica. We present a high resolution 10Be record covering a full climatic cycle over the period 269 to 355 kyr BP from MIS 9 to MIS 10 (Marine Isotope Stages). After correcting 10Be for the estimated effect of the paleomagnetic field, we deduce that the classical estimation of accumulation rate variations from records of water isotopes agrees, with a possible underestimation of 16%, with the uncertainty on the temperature reconstruction from water isotopes in Antarctic ice cores. This is within their uncertainty of −10 to +30%. Finally, we show that the relationship between temperature and accumulation rate is comparable when using ice core data and results from several AGCM simulations run on glacial–interglacial conditions despite a larger spread in model outputs. These results indicate that the thermodynamic law linking moisture content in the air and temperature, as implemented in the different models, leads to realistic results even in polar regions, at the end of the water distillation trajectory.
Print ISSN:
1814-9340
Electronic ISSN:
1814-9359
Topics:
Geosciences
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