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Possible displacement of the climate signal in ancient ice by premelting and anomalous diffusion

Nature volume 411, pages 568–571 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

The best high-resolution records of climate over the past few hundred millennia are derived from ice cores retrieved from Greenland and Antarctica1,2,3. The interpretation of these records relies on the assumption that the trace constituents used as proxies for past climate have undergone only modest post-depositional migration. Many of the constituents are soluble impurities found principally in unfrozen liquid that separates the grain boundaries in ice sheets. This phase behaviour, termed premelting, is characteristic of polycrystalline material4,5. Here we show that premelting influences compositional diffusion in a manner that causes the advection of impurity anomalies towards warmer regions while maintaining their spatial integrity. Notwithstanding chemical reactions that might fix certain species against this prevailing transport, we find that—under conditions that resemble those encountered in the Eemian interglacial ice of central Greenland (from about 125,000 to 115,000 years ago)—impurity fluctuations may be separated from ice of the same age by as much as 50 cm. This distance is comparable to the ice thickness of the contested sudden cooling events in Eemian ice from the GRIP core.

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Figure 1: The hydraulic system of polycrystalline ice.
Figure 2: The temperature14 as a function of depth in the GRIP ice core and the corresponding interstitial concentration of H2SO4.
Figure 3: The physical interactions that cause molecular diffusion to alter the cB-profile in an advective fashion.
Figure 4: Anomalous diffusion of H2SO4 under conditions found at Summit, Greenland.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge R. Alley, J. G. Dash, D. P. Winebrenner, S. G. Warren, G. W. Gross, S. F. Johnsen, J. F. Nye, E. J. Steig, J. P. Steffensen and E. W. Wolff for discussions that have influenced this work. We also thank H. M. Mader for providing the photograph for Figure 1b. Support for this research has been provided by the US National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Box 355640, Seattle, 98105, Washington, USA

    A. W. Rempel & J. S. Wettlaufer

  2. Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, 98195, Washington, USA

    E. D. Waddington

  3. Department of Physics, University of Washington, Box 351560, Seattle, 98105, Washington, USA

    J. S. Wettlaufer

  4. Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Institute of Theoretical Geophysics, University of Cambridge, Silver Street, Cambridge, CB3 9EW, UK

    M. G. Worster

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Correspondence to A. W. Rempel.

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Rempel, A., Waddington, E., Wettlaufer, J. et al. Possible displacement of the climate signal in ancient ice by premelting and anomalous diffusion. Nature 411, 568–571 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35079043

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