Correlation and Chronology of The Vostok Ice-Core Record

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This proposal requests support for research designed (1) to develop an accurate chronology for the climatic records contained in the Vostok East Antarctic ice-core, including the carbon dioxide record soon to be published by C. Lorius and his colleagues; and (2) to compare the Vostok records with climate records obtained from deep-sea cores. The work will be carried out in close cooperation with Claude Lorius and his colleagues at Grenoble. Given an accurate chronology, the length and quality of the Vostok record provide an unprecedented opportunity to understand the dynamics of processes which change carbon dioxide and climate. By cross-correlating the Vostok and deep-sea records, investigations proposed here will establish what the coherencies and phases are between: variations in the atmosphere at Vostok; variations in the temperature, circulation, and carbon budget of the ocean; and variations in volume of global ice. The proposed work promises to link the two most valuable records of climate change on orbital time scales (tens to hundreds of thousands of years) - ice cores and marine sediment cores. This temporal correlation will allow the PI to investigate the detailed nature of climate change in terms of atmospheric chemistry, oceanic circulation, and volume of continental ice. The Vostok ice core is of special importance because of its great length and excellent resolution.