I am happy to share our new manuscript Influence of Meltwater Percolation on Preservation of Organic Aerosol Tracers in Glacier Archives, published today in Environmental Science & Technology. In this paper, we investigate the preservation of secondary organic aerosol tracers in a shallow ice core collected at 4000 m a.s.l. on the Grand Combin (Switzerland).

By applying a novel non-target screening method, we identified 248 different compounds, far exceeding the capabilities of conventional targeted approaches, and observed that 166 of them were removed below a certain depth. After evaluating different hypotheses (including changes in atmospheric transport and variations in source strength), we concluded that the loss of these molecules is associated with increased melting at the drilling site driven by climate change.

This finding is extremely worrying, as it shows that melting is compromising valuable glacier archives even at altitudes that we once believed were “safe” from climate-change impacts.

TO READ: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5c09791