Record Details
Atmospheric CO₂ over the last 1000 years: A high-resolution record from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide ice core
ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Title | Atmospheric CO₂ over the last 1000 years: A high-resolution record from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide ice core |
| Names |
Ahn, Jinho
(creator) Brook, Edward J. (creator) Mitchell, Logan (creator) Rosen, Julia (creator) McConnell, Joseph R. (creator) Taylor, Kendrick (creator) Etheridge, David (creator) Rubino, Mauro (creator) |
| Date Issued | 2012-05-26 (iso8601) |
| Note | This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the American Geophysical Union and can be found at: http://www.agu.org/journals/gb/index.shtml. |
| Abstract | We report a decadally resolved record of atmospheric CO₂ concentration for the last 1000 years, obtained from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide shallow ice core. The most prominent feature of the pre-industrial period is a rapid ∼7 ppm decrease of CO₂ in a span of ∼20–50 years at ∼1600 A.D. This observation confirms the timing of an abrupt atmospheric CO₂ decrease of ∼10 ppm observed for that time period in the Law Dome ice core CO₂ records, but the true magnitude of the decrease remains unclear. Atmospheric CO₂ variations over the time period 1000–1800 A.D. are statistically correlated with northern hemispheric climate and tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperature. However, the exact relationship between CO₂ and climate remains elusive due to regional climate variations and/or uneven geographical data density of paleoclimate records. We observe small differences of 0 ∼ 2% (0 ∼ 6 ppm) among the high-precision CO₂ records from the Law Dome, EPICA Dronning Maud Land and WAIS Divide Antarctic ice cores. However, those records share common trends of CO₂ change on centennial to multicentennial time scales, and clearly show that atmospheric CO₂ has been increasing above preindustrial levels since ∼1850 A.D. |
| Genre | Article |
| Identifier | Ahn, J., E. J. Brook, L. Mitchell, J. Rosen, J. R. McConnell, K. Taylor, D. Etheridge, and M. Rubino (2012), Atmospheric CO₂ over the last 1000 years: A high-resolution record from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide ice core, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 26, GB2027, doi:10.1029/2011GB004247. |
