Browsing by Author "Balco, G"

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    21Ne, 10Be and 26Al cosmogenic burial ages of near-surface eolian sand from the Packard Dune field, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
    (XIX INQUA Congress "Quaternary Perspectives on Climate Change, Natural Hazards and Civilization", 2015-07-26) Fink, D; Augustinus, PC; Rhodes, E; Bristow, C; Balco, G
    The McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, have been ice-free for at least 10 Ma. In Victoria Valley, the largest of the Dry Valleys, permafrosted yet still actively migrating dune-fields, occupy an area of 8 km2 with dune thicknesses varying from 5 to 70 meters. High-resolution ground penetrating radar (GPR) imaging of selected dunes reveal numerous unconformities and complex stratigraphy inferring cycles of sand accretion and deflation from westerly katabatic winter winds sourced from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and anabatic summer winds sourced from the Ross Sea. Samples above permafrost depth were taken for OSL and cosmogenic 26Al/10Be burial ages. OSL ages from shallow (<1m) pits range from modern to 1.3ka suggesting that deposition/reworking of the dunes is ongoing and their present configuration is a late Holocene feature. The same 7 samples gave a mean 26Al/10Be = 4.53 +/- 5% with an average apparent continuous 10Be surface exposure age of 525 +/- 25 ka surprisingly indicating a common pre-history independent of depth. Correcting for minor post-burial production based on OSL ages, the minimum (integrated) burial period for these sand grains is 0.51+/- 0.12 Ma which represents the burial age at the time of arrival at the dune. A possible explanation is that this common burial signal reflects recycling episodes of exposure, deposition, burial and deflation, sufficiently frequent to move all grains towards a common pre-dune deposition history. However, it is unclear over what length of time this processes has been active and fraction of time the sand has been buried. Consequently we also analysed purified quartz aliquots of the same samples for a third and stable nuclide, 21Ne, to determine the total surface and burial exposure periods. Using the 21Ne/10Be system we obtain burial ages of 1.10 +/- 0.10 Ma. Further coring below permafrost is planned for austral summer 2015. © Copyright, 2015 XIX INQUA Congress LOC.
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    New 10Be exposure ages improve Holocene ice sheet thinning history near the grounding line of Pope Glacier, Antarctica
    (European Geosciences Union, 2022-12-06) Adams, JR; Johnson, JS; Roberts, SJ; Mason, PJ; Nichols, KA; Venturelli, RY; Wilcken, KM; Balco, G; Goehring, B; Hall, B; Woodward, J; Rood, DH
    Evidence for the timing and pace of past grounding line retreat of the Thwaites Glacier system in the Amundsen Sea embayment (ASE) of Antarctica provides constraints for models that are used to predict the future trajectory of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Existing cosmogenic nuclide surface exposure ages suggest that Pope Glacier, a former tributary of Thwaites Glacier, experienced rapid thinning in the early to mid-Holocene. There are relatively few exposure ages from the lower ice-free sections of Mt. Murphy (<300 m a.s.l.; metres above sea level) that are uncomplicated by either nuclide inheritance or scatter due to localised topographic complexities; this makes the trajectory for the latter stages of deglaciation uncertain. This paper presents 12 new 10Be exposure ages from erratic cobbles collected from the western flank of Mt. Murphy, within 160 m of the modern ice surface and 1 km from the present grounding line. The ages comprise two tightly clustered populations with mean deglaciation ages of 7.1 ± 0.1 and 6.4 ± 0.1 ka (1 SE). Linear regression analysis applied to the age–elevation array of all available exposure ages from Mt. Murphy indicates that the median rate of thinning of Pope Glacier was 0.27 m yr−1 between 8.1–6.3 ka, occurring 1.5 times faster than previously thought. Furthermore, this analysis better constrains the uncertainty (95 % confidence interval) in the timing of deglaciation at the base of the Mt. Murphy vertical profile (∼ 80 m above the modern ice surface), shifting it to earlier in the Holocene (from 5.2 ± 0.7 to 6.3 ± 0.4 ka). Taken together, the results presented here suggest that early- to mid-Holocene thinning of Pope Glacier occurred over a shorter interval than previously assumed and permit a longer duration over which subsequent late Holocene re-thickening could have occurred. © Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.