Tsambagarav 2009 ice core (Mongolia, 4130 m asl) refractory black carbon record over the past 6,700 years

In June 2009, a 72-m long surface-to-bedrock ice core was drilled on Khukh Nuru Uul, a glacier in the Tsambagarav mountain range of the Mongolian Altai (4130 m asl, 48° 39.338' N, 90° 50.826' E). The small ice cap has low ice temperatures and flat bedrock topography at the drill site. This indicates minimal lateral glacier flow and thereby preserved climate signals. The upper two-thirds of the ice core contain 200 years of climate information with annual resolution, whereas the lower third is subject to strong thinning of the annual layers. Here we provide a continuous high resolution (median 2.1 cm per sample) record of concentrations of refractory black carbon (rBC) from the Tsambagarav ice core encompassing the period from 6.7 ka BP to 2008 CE. We analyzed rBC over the entire core (in 2452 discrete samples) with a Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2, Droplet Measurement Technologies) and a jet (APEX-Q, Elemental Scientific Inc.) nebulizer to aerosolize the aqueous samples using methods described in detail by Sigl et al., (2018) and Osmont et al., (2019). The depth-age model is described in Herren et al., (2013). This dataset underpins and supports analyses of anthropogenic and natural emissions of aerosol species form forest fires, biomass burning and industrial emissions over the industrial (Bauer et al., 2020; Eckhardt et al., 2023) and over pre-industrial periods (Brugger et al., 2018).