National Snow & Ice Data Center

nsidc-0311

Trapped Gas Composition and Chronology of the Vostok Ice Core

This data set includes a time scale for the Vostok ice core, retrieved from Vostok Station on the East Antarctic Plateau. This chronology is derived by orbitally tuning to molecular oxygen to nitrogen (O₂/N₂) ratios in occluded air for depths deeper than 1550 m (greater than 112,000 years old), and by gas correlation to the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) chronology for the ice core section that is shallower than 1422 m (less than 102,000 years old). Because of poor gas preservation in air bubbles in shallower depths, investigators could only constrain the Vostok chronology for the section deeper than 1550 m by O₂/N₂. Thus for the shallower section of the core, they synchronized the Vostok delta oxygen-18 (&delta;¹⁸O) and methane (CH₄) measurements to those of the GISP2 to obtain the chronology (see Bender, et al. 2006). Note, CH₄ data are not included in this data set. Investigators analyzed the O₂/N₂ and the<em><strong> </strong></em>&delta;¹⁸O record ratios for approximately the past 115,000 to 400,000 years in the Vostok ice core. They combined new measurements for O₂/N₂ and &delta;¹⁸O with data from Bender (2002) and Petit, et al. (1999), respectively. Data are in Microsoft Excel format and are available via FTP.

nsidc.org

http://nsidc.org/data/NSIDC-0311

Identified by : NSIDC-0311

This dataset was released on July 10, 2007.

The time range for this dataset is September 01, 2003 to June 30, 2006.

The spatial range for this dataset is -72.4667° to -72.4667° latitude, and -106.8° to -106.8° longitude. map

DOI : 10.7265/N5P26W12
Also known as :

• dataset oai:nsidc/NSIDC-0311 (nsidc lexicon)