High-resolution elemental and chemical measurements in the NGRIP2 core, North Greenland, 2015

Continuous elemental and chemical measurements were made on archived samples of the North Greenland Ice Core Project 2 (NGRIP2) core using the unique ice core analytical system (McConnell et al., ES and T, 2002; McConnell et al., PNAS, 2017) at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. Measurements were made between ~159.5 and ~582.4 m depth. The primary objective was to develop a well-dated record of lead concentration, enrichment, and depositional flux from ~1235 BCE to ~1270 CE to investigate industrial pollution from the Iron Age through Antiquity to the High Middle Ages (McConnell et al., PNAS, 2018; McConnell et al., PNAS, 2019). Included in this research was the development of an independent ice chronology based on annual layer counting of seasonal variation in the measured chemistry. More recently, the measurements of sodium, calcium, ammonium, nitrate in NGRIP2 presented here contributed to the development of a new ice chronology for the last 3800 years called the Greenland Ice Core Chronology 2021 or GICC02 (Sinnl et al., Clim Past, 2022).