Talk by Paul Travis Vallelonga

Title: RECAP Dust record

Two ice core drillings have been undertaken on the Renland ice cap, located on the coast in central East Greenland. The most recent Renland ice core, known as RECAP, was drilled in 2015 and combined chemistry, isotope and methane measurements were conducted on the Copenhagen Continuous Flow Analysis system in late 2015. I will present a summary of the RECAP project and then focus on the RECAP dust record which was recently published in Nature Communications. The paper can be downloaded here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12546-2

And the article abstract is here:

Accurate estimates of the past extent of the Greenland ice sheet provide critical constraints for ice sheet models used to determine Greenland’s response to climate forcing and con- tribution to global sea level. Here we use a continuous ice core dust record from the Renland ice cap on the east coast of Greenland to constrain the timing of changes to the ice sheet margin and relative sea level over the last glacial cycle. During the Holocene and the previous interglacial period (Eemian) the dust record was dominated by coarse particles consistent with rock samples from central East Greenland. From the coarse particle concentration record we infer the East Greenland ice sheet margin advanced from 113.4 ± 0.4 to 111.0 ± 0.4 ka BP during the glacial onset and retreated from 12.1±0.1 to 9.0±0.1 ka BP during the last deglaciation. These findings constrain the possible response of the Greenland ice sheet to climate forcings.