Groundwater recharged less than 50 years ago is vulnerable to contamination and land-use changes. Data and simulations suggest that up to 6% of continental groundwater is modern—forming the largest component of the active hydrologic cycle.

The global volume and distribution of modern groundwater

. Two ice cores were retrieved from high elevations (~5800 m a.s.l.) at Mt. Nyainqentanglha and Mt. Geladaindong in the southern and central Tibetan Plateau region. The combined tracer analysis of tritium (3H), 210Pb and mercury, along with other chemical records, provided multiple lines of evidence supporting that the two coring sites had not received net ice accumulation since at least the 1950s and 1980s, respectively. These results implied an annual ice loss rate of more than several hundred millimeter water equivalent over the past 30–60 years. Both mass balance modeling at the sites and in situ data from the nearby glaciers confirmed a continuously negative mass balance (or mass loss) in the region due to dramatic warming in recent decades. Along with a recent report on Naimona'nyi Glacier in the Himalayas, the findings suggest that the loss of accumulation area of glacier is a possibility from the southern to central Tibetan Plateau at high elevations, probably up to about 5800 m a.s.l. This mass loss raises concerns over the rapid rate of glacier ice loss and associated changes in surface glacier runoff, water availability, and sea levels.

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Dramatic loss of glacier accumulation area on the Tibetan Plateau revealed by ice core tritium and mercury records

Atmospheric nuclear weapons testing (NWT) resulted in the injection of plutonium (Pu) into the atmosphere and subsequent global deposition. We present a new method for continuous semiquantitative measurement of 239Pu in ice cores, which was used to develop annual records of fallout from NWT in ten ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The 239Pu was measured directly using an inductively coupled plasma–sector field mass spectrometer, thereby reducing analysis time and increasing depth-resolution with respect to previous methods. To validate this method, we compared our one year averaged results to published 239Pu records and other records of NWT. The 239Pu profiles from the Arctic ice cores reflected global trends in NWT and were in agreement with discrete Pu profiles from lower latitude ice cores. The 239Pu measurements in the Antarctic ice cores tracked low latitude NWT, consistent with previously published discrete records from Antarctica. Advantages of the continuous 239Pu measurement method are (1)...

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A Method for Continuous 239Pu Determinations in Arctic and Antarctic Ice Cores

Sources of radiogenic helium in a clay till aquitard and its use to evaluate the timing of geologic events

The response of Arctic ice masses to climate change is studied using ice cores containing information on past climatic and environmental features. Interpretation of this information requires accurate chronological data. Absolute dating of ice cores from sub-polar Arctic glaciers is possible using well-known radioactive layers deposited by atmospheric nuclear tests (maximum fallout in 1963) and the Chernobyl accident (1986). Analysis of several isotopes (H-3, Cs-137) shows that H-3 provides the most accurate dating of the 1963 maximum as indicated also in comparison with results from total-beta measurements (Sr-90 and Cs-137). Mean annual net mass balances are derived from the dated ice cores from 1963 up to the date of the drillings. The Cs-137 and H-3 deposited by nuclear tests, after decay correction, are used to define a melt index for all 13 ice cores studied. The relative strength of melting and percolation post-depositional processes is studied on the basis of these Cs-137 and H-3 deposits.

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Ice cores from Arctic sub-polar glaciers : Chronology and post-depositional processes deduced from radioactivity measurements

Numerous studies of the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica have observed accumulations of transuranic radionuclides and fission products from nuclear weapons testing, particularly during the period 1945–75. Recently, the concentrations of radionuclides in the annually deposited surface layers of Agassiz Ice Cap, Ellesmere Island, Canadian Arctic, from 1945 to the present have been measured and have demonstrated a continuous record of deposition of 137Cs and 239,240Pu in ice and snow. In this study, 3He-ingrowth mass spectrometry has been used to measure the low levels of tritium (3H) in some of these samples. Pre-nuclear-bomb tritium levels in ice-core samples were approximately 12 TU in high-latitude meteoric waters and 3–9 TU in mid-latitude meteoric waters. Comparisons of 3H levels and 3H/137Cs + 239,240Pu ratios, which were quite low during the earliest fission-bomb detonations (1946–51) and substantially higher during thermonuclear hydrogen-fusion bomb testing (1952–64), provide a clear indication of the type of nuclear device detonated. This finding accords with the results from other ice-core studies of the distribution of anthropogenic radionuclides from bomb fallout.

Thomas G. Kotzer

Papers

Natural and anthropogenic levels of tritium in a Canadian Arctic ice core, Agassiz Ice Cap, Ellesmere Island, and comparison with other radionuclides