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Particle on ice: characterising naoparticles in deep ice cores as paleoclimatic indicators

Project description

Studying Earth’s climate history from Antarctic dust

The Antarctic ice preserves a 1.5 million-year-long climate archive through mineral dust impurities. The information contained in these particles is crucial for the study of past climatic and environmental conditions. Nevertheless, due to the high time compression in the deep ice layer, where hundreds of years fit into just a few centimetres, the identification of separate events becomes almost impossible using conventional techniques. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SPICE project is designed to solve this problem by applying laser ablation micro-sampling coupled with multi-element single particle analysis. Overall, the project makes it possible to analyse the characteristics of the dust in two dimensions on a micrometre scale.

Objective

Mineral dust trapped in Antarctic ice is key to improving our understanding the past climate of our planet and predicting future conditions. Dust encodes information in the form of its spatial distribution, size, elemental composition and concentration, and can be used to determine climatic, environmental and atmospheric processes. The discovery of 1.5 million year old ice has sparked new hope to better understand major paleoclimatic events. However, post-depositional effects and the compact nature of deep ice, where centuries are compressed into centimetres, obscure our view into the past. Without overcoming these technical challenges, our understanding of major climatic events is limited. This project aims to improve our interpretations by combining two state-of-the-art techniques, laser ablation micro-sampling of ice and multi-elemental single particle analysis. This will provide us with the tools to map dust particle properties in two dimensions and target sharp ice grain boundaries that host a range of impurities. By interrogating ice-impurity interactions at the micrometre resolutions of laser ablation we will provide the required tools to fully exploit the knowledge contained within mineral dust proxies.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET GRAZ
Net EU contribution
€ 214 344,72
Address
UNIVERSITATSPLATZ 3
8010 Graz
Austria
Region
Südösterreich Steiermark Graz
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost
No data

Partners (1)