Ice cores can reveal historical information about climate and vegetation through trapped aerosols such as dust, soot and complex molecules.
Matthew Makou of Ohio State University in Columbus and a team of fellow ice enthusiasts looked at compounds derived from tropical plants that were blown to high altitudes, where they became trapped in ice. The researchers tried out relatively new methods — stir-bar sorptive extraction and thermal desorption — that allowed useful information to be extracted from such compounds without the need for many kilograms of ice.
The authors suggest that the methods will be useful in reconstructing past characteristics of tropical areas, such as forest-fire occurrence, vegetation cover and aridity.
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Palaeoclimatology: Tropical ice. Nature 460, 308 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/460308b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/460308b
