Pamir Ice Core Stable Isotopes, ICPMS, LAICPMS, Pamir Mountain Range, 2016

Central Asia is one of the most arid regions on Earth, and is particularly sensitive to changes in moisture delivery. Central Asia is highly dependent on glacier meltwater for its water resources. Its high mountains hold great volumes of glacial ice, with seasonal snow melt supplying up to 80% of the region's fresh water needs. However, since the 1960s, central Asia has lost over 14% of its glacier covered area and ~18% of its ice volume. Changes in glacially-fed hydrologic systems impact water availability and biodiversity in these regions. However, these observations cover only a fraction of the climate history of this region. Ice cores from glaciers in the high Himalayas preserve records of millennia of climate changes. Understanding the natural variability recorded in such records is of critical importance for interpreting the vulnerability of the region to modern and future climate change. Most existing well-dated ice core records from Central Asia (Fedchenko Glacier (Aizen, et al., 2009), It-Tish Ice Cap (Thompson, et al., 1997), Grigorieva Ice Cap (Thompson, et al., 1997; Fujita, et al., 2011) and Inilchek Glacier (Aizen, et al., 2006)) are relatively short, covering the last ~100 years at most. A 100-year-long record includes only that portion of the climate history in Central Asia that is already contained in weather station records (GHCN, 2019). Collecting a long-term ice core record is a necessary step in assessing the natural variability of atmospheric circulation, temperature, and moisture delivery in the region. Our core site in the high Pamir Mountains was selected with the goal of collecting an older record than exists at present from Central Asia with a sampling resolution that would allow annual or sub-annual pattern recognition. This project recovered a surface-to-bedrock ice core from the Pamir Mountains, in Tajikistan, Central Asia in 2016. The data recovered from it will be used to develop detailed records of climate changes in central Asia during the Holocene. The results will be used to reconstruct the dynamics and rates of moderate, abrupt, and threshold changes in climate in Central Asia. Specifically, the research team has generated sub-annually-resolved, multivariate geochemical records from the ice core (including stable isotopes, trace elements, major ions, and dust particles). Ongoing efforts to recover pollen and other biological materials are ongoing. This data set contains chemical records from the 2016 Pamir ice core. It represents one of the oldest high-resolution ice core chemical records yet recovered from the region, dating to older than 400 C.E. (Current Era). We utilized novel ultrahigh resolution (~500 samples per centimeter of ice core depth) Laser Ablation Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LAICPMS) sampling protocols which allow ice core records to be dated and analyzed where the record is too compressed for traditional methods to resolve. Discrete sampling of stable water isotopes in the core was done at 0.05meter resolution. Continuous melter sampling for 29 major and trace elements was done at 0.01meter resolution. LAICPMS sampling of selected sections of the core with high-quality ice was done at .00002meter resolution.