Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core

• Main Authors: J R Petit, J Jouzel, D Raynaud, N I Barkov, J.-M Barnola, I Basile, M Bender, J Chappellaz, M Davisk, G Delaygue, M Delmotte, V M Kotlyakov, M Legrand, V Y Lipenkov, C Lorius, L Pé, C Ritz, E Saltzmank, M Stievenard
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1999
• Subjects: Antarctic; East Antarctica; Vostok Station; Antarc*; Antarctica; ice core
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1050.2725

Antarctica has allowed the extension of the ice record of atmospheric composition and climate to the past four glacial-interglacial cycles. The succession of changes through each climate cycle and termination was similar, and atmospheric and climate properties oscillated between stable bounds. Interglacial periods differed in temporal evolution and duration. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years. The late Quaternary period (the past one million years) is punctuated by a series of large glacial-interglacial changes with cycles that last about 100,000 years (ref. 1). Glacial-interglacial climate changes are documented by complementary climate records 1,2 largely derived from deep sea sediments, continental deposits of flora, fauna and loess, and ice cores. These studies have documented the wide range of climate variability on Earth. They have shown that much of the variability occurs with periodicities corresponding to that of the precession, obliquity and eccentricity of the Earth's orbit 1,3 . But understanding how the climate system responds to this initial orbital forcing is still an important issue in palaeoclimatology, in particular for the generally strong ϳ100,000-year (100-kyr) cycle. Ice cores give access to palaeoclimate series that includes local temperature and precipitation rate, moisture source conditions, wind strength and aerosol fluxes of marine, volcanic, terrestrial, cosmogenic and anthropogenic origin. They are also unique with their entrapped air inclusions in providing direct records of past changes in atmospheric trace-gas composition. The ice-drilling project undertaken in the framework of a long-term collaboration between Russia, the United States and France at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica (78Њ S, 106Њ E, elevation 3,488 m, mean temperature −55 ЊC) has ...