Climate scientists hoping to unlock the secrets of a 1.5-million-year-old ice core soon to be recovered from Antarctica have a new tool at their disposal. The Department of Environmental Sciences at Ca’Foscari University of Venice has recently assembled a new state-of-the-art LA-ICP-MS setup dedicated to ice core analysis.
Ice core science is one of the cornerstones of climate research that aims to gain a fuller picture of what our planet looked like from decades to hundreds of millennia ago. Due to the flow of glacier ice, the oldest, deepest layers of ice are also often the thinnest. Unlocking the data contained in these thin layers is a challenge requiring new high-resolution techniques.
The university installed a Teledyne CETAC laser ablation system with a cryogenic insert designed specifically to maintain sub-zero temperatures while ice cores are analyzed. The ice layers are expected to be less than a millimeter thick, but the laser can drill holes only microns deep.
Using Teledyne CETAC HDIP imaging software, analysts can look at individual ice crystals and other microscopic features that make up a glacier, as well as impurities from the prehistoric atmosphere. Because the ice cores are kept frozen and the laser does very little damage, ice core samples can be archived after analysis for later research.
What’s more, the new system is roughly 20 times faster than previous methods with the potential to go even faster. This quick cryogenic analysis will help further, not just climate science, but material engineering and biomedical research, as well
Broader implications of this technology beyond environmental research include material and medical research. The full paper can be found at: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ja/d0ja00170h#!divAbstract
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