DEP-derived density from two snow trenches from Kohnen Station, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica from the 2012/13 field season ...

• Main Authors: Laepple, Thomas, Hörhold, Maria, Münch, Thomas, Freitag, Johannes, Wegner, Anna, Kipfstuhl, Sepp
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2016
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctica; Dronning Maud Land; Greenland; ice core; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.865344; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.865344

The density of firn is an important property for monitoring and modeling the ice sheet as well as to model the pore close-off and thus to interpret ice core-based greenhouse gas records. One feature, which is still in debate, is the potential existence of an annual cycle of firn density in low-accumulation regions. Several studies describe or assume seasonally successive density layers, horizontally evenly distributed, as seen in radar data. On the other hand, high-resolution density measurements on firn cores in Antarctica and Greenland showed no clear seasonal cycle in the top few meters. A major caveat of most existing snow-pit and firn-core based studies is that they represent one vertical profile from a laterally heterogeneous density field. To overcome this, we created an extensive dataset of horizontal and vertical density data at Kohnen Station, Dronning Maud Land on the East Antarctic Plateau. We drilled and analyzed three 90 m long firn cores as well as 160 one meter long vertical profiles from two ... : Campaign: "Coldest Firn Associated Projects" (CoFiAP) ...