Visual Stratigraphy-Based Age Scale Developed for the Shallow Mount Siple Firn Core, Antarctica

• Main Authors: Brown, JW, Moser, DE, Emanuelsson, DB, Thomas, ER
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2023
• Subjects: 37 Earth Sciences; 3709 Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience; 3705 Geology; Eye Disease and Disorders of Vision; Antarctic; West Antarctica; Siple; Mount Siple; Antarc*; Antarctica; ice core; Swiss Polar Institute
• Online Access: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/348333; https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.95756

Peer reviewed: True Funder: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Funder: Swiss Polar Institute Funder: Ferring Pharmaceuticals Inc. Funder: Natural Environment Research Council to the British Antarctic Survey’s Ice Dynamics and Paleoclimate program <jats:p>Here we present a case study for using visual stratigraphy to date a shallow firn core from coastal West Antarctica. The Mount Siple ice core has the potential to reconstruct climate in this data-sparse region over recent decades. Line scanned images of the 24 m firn core were used to generate a grey-scale, which displays variability consistent with annual cycles. The resulting Mount Siple age scale spans from 1998 ± 1 to 2017 CE. This study demonstrates that the seasonal changes in the grey-scale record provide an independent method of dating firn cores. However, the presence of melt layers at this site has introduced an error of ±1 year. Visual line stratigraphy has the unique advantage over traditional annual layer counting, based on chemical or isotopic species, of being non-destructive and relatively inexpensive. Visual line stratigraphy has proved to be an effective dating method for this site.</jats:p>