| Summary: | Since the pioneering attempts by Scholander et al. (1961), the observation that the porous spaces in natural ice contain samples of ancient air, the study of ice cores for potential insights into the history of the atmospheric CO2 concentration has received great attention from scientists interested in the reconstruction of environmental parameters. Progress, however, was made possible only because deep ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, which are continuous sequences of generally high-quality samples formed during the last 100,000 and 50,000 years, respectively, were available for study. Research has led to new techniques for extracting gases from ice and to recent developments of sensitive and accurate techniques for the analysis of gas. Today, analysis of gas concentrations in air entrapped in natural ice is considered to be the most promising method for reconstructing the history of the atmospheric CO2 concentration (WMO 1983).
|
|---|