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Updated: Jun 27, 2026

Measuring Carbon-based Contaminant Mineralization Using Combined CO2 Flux and Radiocarbon Analyses
Published on: October 21, 2016
Continuous flow analysis of total organic carbon in polar ice cores
Urs Federer1, Patrik R Kaufmann, Manuel A Hutterli
1Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland. federer@climate.unibe.ch
Abstract:
Ice cores are a widely used archive to reconstruct past changes of the climate system. This is done by measuring the concentration of substances in the ice and in the air of bubbles enclosed in ice. Some species pertaining to the carbon cycle (e.g., CO2, CH4) are routinely measured. However, information about the organic fraction of the impurities in polar ice is still very limited. Therefore, we developed a new method to determine the content of total organic carbon (TOC) in ice cores using a continuous flow analysis (CFA) system. The method is based on photochemical oxidation of TOC and the electrolytic quantification of the CO2 produced during oxidation. The TOC instrument features a limit of detection of 2 ppbC and a response time of 60 s at a sample flow rate of 0.7 mL/min and a linear measurement range of 2-4000 ppbC. First measurements on the ice core from Talos Dome, Antarctica, reveal TOC concentrations varying between 80 and 360 ppbC in the 20 m section presented.
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