Author(s)

Hironori Sato, Toshitaka Suzuki, Motohiro Hirabayashi, Yoshinori Iizuka, Hideaki Motoyama, Yoshiyuki Fujii

Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, Yamagata University, Yamagata, Japan.
Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
National Institute of Polar Research, Tokyo, Japan.

A quantitative analysis of the total concentrations of Al and Na in the Antarctic ice sheet during the past 340 kyr was performed by applying the acid digestion method to the Dome Fuji ice core. Atmospheric fluxes of mineral and sea-salt aerosol to Dome Fuji were calculated from the total concentration. The average fluxes of mineral aerosol to Dome Fuji in the periods of glacial maximum, 18.6 ± 10.1 mg·m^–2·yr^–1, were larger than the value in the interglacial periods, 3.77 ± 2.20 mg·m^–2·yr^–1. Conversely, the fluxes of sea-salt have no significant difference between the average value of glacial maximum, 130 ± 55 mg·m^–2·yr^–1, and that of interglacial, 111 ± 54 mg·m^–2·yr^–1. The results obtained in this study suggest that the variation of mineral aerosol flux in Dome Fuji, together with climate change, was much larger than that of sea-salt aerosol flux. This result may have occurred because the variety in the intensity of the source and transport during the glacial-interglacial cycle is more significant for mineral aerosol than that for sea-salt aerosol.

Ice Core; Antarctica; Dome Fuji; Climate Change; Aerosol Flux; Full Digestion

H. Sato, T. Suzuki, M. Hirabayashi, Y. Iizuka, H. Motoyama and Y. Fujii, "Mineral and Sea-Salt Aerosol Fluxes over the Last 340 kyr Reconstructed from the Total Concentration of Al and Na in the Dome Fuji Ice Core," Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2013, pp. 186-192. doi: 10.4236/acs.2013.32020.