Modelling water isotopes in polar ice sheets ...

• Main Author: Lhomme, Nicolas
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2009
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctica; Greenland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0052371; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0052371

Concentrations of water isotopes in marine sediments and ice cores are a key indicator for estimating global and regional fluctuations of past temperatures. Interpreting these concentrations requires an understanding of the storage capacity and exchanges among the ocean, atmosphere and cryosphere as well as an understanding of the dynamical behaviour of these reservoirs. The contribution of the latter remains poorly established because of the paucity of deep ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica and the difficulty of interpreting these cores. To obtain the water isotope composition of polar ice sheets and gain an understanding of their stratigraphy, I develop a tracer transport method first proposed by Clarke and Marshall (2002) and significantly improve it by introducing an interpolation technique that accounts for the particular age-depth relationship of ice sheets. I combine the tracers with numerical models of ice dynamics to predict the fine layering of polar ice masses such that it is locally validated ...