Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques 10 (2017): 4459-4477, doi:10.5194/amt-10-4459-2017.
Description:
Insoluble aerosol particles trapped in glacial ice provide insight into past climates, but analysis requires information on climatically relevant particle properties, such as size, abundance, and internal mixing. We present a new analytical method using a time-of-flight single-particle mass spectrometer (SPMS) to determine the composition and size of insoluble particles in glacial ice over an aerodynamic size range of ∼ 0.2–3.0 µm diameter. Using samples from two Greenland ice cores, we developed a procedure to nebulize insoluble particles suspended in melted ice, evaporate condensed liquid from those particles, and transport them to the SPMS for analysis. We further determined size-dependent extraction and instrument transmission efficiencies to investigate the feasibility of determining particle-class-specific mass concentrations. We find SPMS can be used to provide constraints on the aerodynamic size, composition, and relative abundance of most insoluble particulate classes in ice core samples. We describe the importance of post-aqueous processing to particles, a process which occurs due to nebulization of aerosols from an aqueous suspension of originally soluble and insoluble aerosol components. This study represents an initial attempt to use SPMS as an emerging technique for the study of insoluble particulates in ice cores.
Description:
This work was supported by an internal
Reed Grant from MIT and National Science Foundation award
PLR-1205196 to Sarah B. Das. Matthew Osman acknowledges
government support awarded by DoD, Air Force Office of Scientific
Research, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate
(NDSEG) Fellowship, 32 CFR 168a. Maria A. Zawadowicz
acknowledges the support of NASA Earth and Space Science
Fellowship. Daniel J. Cziczo acknowledges the support of the
Victor P. Starr Career Development Chair at MIT.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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