CAREER: Transport of air pollutants between mid-latitudes and the polar regions: an 800-year perspective from a Russian Arctic ice-core record.

About This Grant

Droughts and wildfires generate increasing amounts of dust and soot. Dust in the atmosphere has doubled since 1850 and soot has doubled in the last decade. Dust, soot, and other atmospheric pollutants are the biggest source of uncertainty in climate models. Long-term observations are especially lacking in the Arctic region. Ice cores from Arctic glaciers are the best way to fill gaps in climate data for the Arctic. This project will reconstruct a detailed 800-year history of fires, dust, sea ice, and Arctic glaciers. It will use the only existing ice core ever recovered from Franz Joseph Land, Russia. This comprehensive project will constitute a baseline for future observations of pollutants entering the Arctic atmosphere. This project will train the next generation of Arctic scientists and will engage local community partners to deploy air samplers in Ohio to provide air chemistry data, highly valuable to health and urban planners, and to the public. The intensifying wildfire activity worldwide and the emission of black carbon (BC) aerosols have negative consequences. This project will investigate a unique ice core archive from Franz Joseph Land (FJL) in the western Russian High Arctic. It will test the hypothesis that environmental changes have favored the transport of aerosols towards the Barents-Kara region of the Arctic ocean. The project will reconstruct 800-year high resolution records of aerosol deposition by analyzing the concentration and deposition fluxes of BC and trace elements (TEs), distinguishing different sources. The team will also trace the provenance of the FJL ice core dust by determining its mineralogical and geochemical composition. They will resolve the statistical relationship between these new “paleo-aerosol” time series and the Barents-sea-ice proxy records previously extracted from the FJL ice core. This study will yield a highly comprehensive “paleo-aerosol” dataset essential for glacier energy balance models and for paleofire danger models. The FJL BC record will help constrain the inventory of Arctic methane, while the detailed dust geochemical and mineralogical data will help calibrate radiative forcing models. All time series (i.e., BC, TEs, dust) will serve as fundamental references for Arctic ice core microbiological research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.