Lead in Continental Ice Sheets

The natural sources of environmental lead include (Nriagu 1978)  

Forest fires, volcanic eruptions, and meteorite impacts (3%) 

The greatest contribution to our knowledge of the environmental geochemistry of lead was made by Professor C.C. Patterson and his associates at the California Institute of Technology. An entire issue of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (vol. 58, No. 15, 1994) was devoted to Professor Patterson upon his retirement. The effect of environmental lead on public health was also considered in a major work on medical geochemistry edited by Selmus et al. (2005). 

Analyses of ice in the core drilled at Camp Century in northwest Greenland revealed that the concentration of lead increased gradually from 0.011 pg/kg in 1753 A.D. to 0.068 pg/kg in 1945 A.D. Subsequently, the concentration of lead rose steeply and reached 0.16 pg/kg in 1960 (Murozumi et al. 1969). The dramatic increase in the concentration of lead in this ice core was attributed to the widespread use of gasoline that contained tetra-ethyl lead as an additive. 

Ice in cores drilled through the East Antarctic ice sheet at Dome C and Vostok contains lead at widely varying concentration depending on chmatic conditions 

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