Unraveling paleo-climate knots with lasers

“We aim to reconstruct seemingly lost paleoclimatic information from the disturbed bottom part of a deep Greenland ice core. The section in focus, possibly contains ice from the Marine Isotope Stage 5 with an age older than 120,000 years before present. This means that the ice can originate from the last Interglacial Period and the previous Ice Age, both sections being considered as the Holy Grail in ice core science. In order to attack this challenging problem we will attempt a never tried before approach that looks into the very slow diffusive process of the water isotopes in solid ice. This approach requires data sets of unprecedented quality.  Thereby we also propose a completely new method for the measurement of water isotopic ratios in ice cores based on a unique combination of UV Laser Ablation and IR Cavity Ring Down Spectroscopy. Our proposed technique is a beyond state of the art idea and has potential to open new frontiers in ice core science."