A new ice mill allows precise concentration determination of methane and most probably also other trace gases in the bubble air of very small ice samples

A new extraction system has been constructed and tested which allows the extraction of gases from air bubbles in ice without melting it. An ice sample of up to 20 g is crushed in a sealed container by a milling cutter and the gas escaping from the opened bubbles is flushed with helium to a Porapak c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Glaciology
Main Authors: Fuchs, Andreas, Schwander, Jakob, Stauffer, Bernhard
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: International Glaciological Society 1993
Subjects:
Online Access:https://boris.unibe.ch/158679/1/fuchs93jg.pdf
https://boris.unibe.ch/158679/
Description
Summary:A new extraction system has been constructed and tested which allows the extraction of gases from air bubbles in ice without melting it. An ice sample of up to 20 g is crushed in a sealed container by a milling cutter and the gas escaping from the opened bubbles is flushed with helium to a Porapak column where it is stored until its injection into the gas Chromatograph. To avoid any contamination with CH4 produced by friction in the gear section, a helium-flushed rotary feed-through is used. CH4 analyses on ice samples of about 10 g from the last 1000 years give precise and reproducible results. In the future, it is planned to measure also the CO2 and N2O concentrations on the same sample.