CO<sub>2</sub> isotopes as tracers of firn air diffusion and age in an Arctic ice cap with summer melting, Devon Island, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Firn air and ice have been sampled and analyzed for trace gases (CO2, N2O, CH4, and CO) and isotopes (14C, 13C, and 18O of CO2; 3H of ice) at 3 m intervals from the surface to the depth of closure at 60 m on the Devon Island Ice Cap, a low‐elevation permanent glacier in the Canadian Arctic Islands, to investigate firn diffusion and the effects of summer melting. The 14CO2 profile from the permeable firn includes the 1963 thermonuclear peak at a depth of 53.9 ± 1.5 m. The twofold increase and rapid decay that characterize the recent atmospheric history for 14CO2 provide a robust atmospheric scenario that is used with a firn air diffusion model to inversely construct the firn diffusivity profile. The results show a permeable but essentially nondiffusive zone from 50 to 60 m depth. A firn‐ice age profile was produced from density measurements, and accumulation rates were calibrated with the depth of the 1963 thermonuclear 3H peak. The average ages for CO2 in the sampled firn air profile were determined by a new method based on the rate of 18O exchange between CO2 and the ice matrix. Calibrated with the 1963 peak for thermonuclear 14CO2, a 21.2‐year reaction halftime is calculated for exchange taking place at the firn temperature of −22.8°C on Devon. This gives an average age of 54.9 (+6.0/−12.0) years for firn air at 60 m depth in 140‐year‐old ice. Thus CO2 has a mean age 85 years younger than associated ice at the point of occlusion. The measured in firn air provides no indication of alteration by summer melting, which is attributed to a high degree of convective and diffusive flushing of the upper firn as shown by diffusion modeling. This suggests that ice sheets with summer melt layers can reliably preserve atmospheric trace gas signals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".