Historical Carbon Dioxide Record from the Siple Station Ice Core (1734-1983) ...

• Main Authors: Neftel, A., Friedli, H., Moor, E., Lotscher, H., Oeschger, H., Siegenthaler, U., Stauffer, B.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Environmental System Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem; Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC); Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States) 1994
• Subjects: 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctica; ice core; West Antarctica
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.3334/cdiac/atg.010; https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1394153/

Determinations of ancient atmospheric CO2 concentrations for Siple Station, located in West Antarctica, were derived from measurements of air occluded in a 200-m core drilled at Siple Station in the Antarctic summer of 1983-84. The core was drilled by the Polar Ice Coring Office in Nebraska and the Physics Institute at the University of Bern. The ice could be dated with an accuracy of approximately ±2 years to a depth of 144 m (which corresponds to the year 1834) by counting seasonal variations in electrical conductivity. Below that depth, the core was dated by extrapolation (Friedli et al. 1986). The gases from ice samples were extracted by a dry-extraction system, in which bubbles were crushed mechanically to release the trapped gases, and then analyzed for CO2 by infrared laser absorption spectroscopy or by gas chromatography (Neftel et al. 1985). After the ice samples were crushed, the gas expanded over a cold trap, condensing the water vapor at -80°C in the absorption cell. The analytical system was ...