Science Daily February 16, 2023
The objective of EPICA [European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica] is to look back 1.5 million years into the past and obtain data on the development of temperature, the composition of the atmosphere and the carbon cycle. A depth of around 2700 meters must be reached in the Antarctic ice sheet and an ice core recovered which they plan to accomplish by 2025. In the 1.5-million-year-old ice, 15,000 to 20,000 years of climate history are compressed into just one meter of ice core, which places completely new demands on ice core analyzes. Researchers in Switzerland have developed a new laser spectrometer that can measure greenhouse gases on a sample of just 1.5 milliliters of air. They also developed a sublimation technique using which an ice core sample could be slowly transformed from the top to the bottom from the solid to gaseous state. Another advantage of the method: the air extracted from the ice samples is not lost during the measurement in the laser spectrometer, instead it can be used for further analyzes afterwards… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Schematic diagram of the laser-induced sublimation extraction (LISE) system….Credit: Atmos. Meas. Tech., 16, 355–372