Snow composition

G. Piccardi, F. Casella, R. Udisti, Non-sea-salt contribution of some chemical species to the snow composition at Terra Nova Bay (Antartica), Int. J. Environ. Anal. Chem., 63 (1996), 207-223. 

F. Casella, R. Udisti, G. Piccardi, The Oceanic Source Contribution to the Snow Composition, as Function of Elevation, at Two Coastal Stations in the Terra Nova Bay Area (Antarctica). Terra Antartica Reports, 1 (1997), 77-80. 

The composition of the earth s atmosphere differs from day to day, from altitude to altitude, and from place to place. The largest variation is in the concentration of water vapor. Water evaporates continually from the hydrosphere, from the soil, from leaves, from clothes drying, etc. At intervals, parts of the atmosphere become chilled until the dew point or frost point is reached and then any vapor in excess of the saturation amount is precipitated as rain or snow. 

Fig. 18-7 Observed correlation of isotopic composition with temperature for near-surface snow in Greenland (Johnsen et ah, 1989), and Antarctica (Dahe et ah, 1994).

In a climax to his sediment studies, Patterson reported tersely that we have found the composition of lead in snow to be very different from the composition of lead which has been deposited on the ocean floors during the past 100,000 years. The lead in Lassen Volcanic National Park had a signature mix of lead isotopes, a characteristic fingerprint identifying it as a... 

Water vapor enriched in oxygen-16 is transported by wind in the atmosphere from the sea to land. When the water vapor condenses and precipitates as rain, snow, or hail, the water becomes rich in oxygen-16. Eventually the oxygen-16 rich water is incorporated into rivers, lakes, glaciers, and polar ice, which are, therefore, also rich in oxygen-16. Thus the isotopic composition of groundwater and the water of rivers, lakes, and glaciers is not the same as in seas and oceans. 

The application of glaciochemical horizons to ice core dating is a recent and rapidly evolving development. A concerted search is under way to determine the impact of known events on the chemical composition of polar snow. So far, two types of universally applicable horizons have been detected in polar ice cores volcanic eruptions and Late Wisconsin dust. 

It should be emphasized that the deviations from the logarithmic correlation obey the normal distribution statistics, allowing one to apply convenient statistical procedures to analytical measurement results. As will be shown below, the logarithmic linear correlation rule was observed for all types of geo-chemical samples, i. e., snow, air, water, and soil. The correlation analysis of the elemental composition of melted-snow fractions showed with confidence level 95% that no significant discrepancy exists between the element composition within the correlation curves (see Table 1) and the corresponding variances are thus homogeneous for any two randomly chosen samples (i. e., points of the territory). 

To make this conclusion more reliable, we applied the above statistical comparison procedure to independent data on the chemical composition of melted snow samples, which were collected in the vicinity of a nickelprocessing plant, on the Kola Peninsula [2], and an industrial megalopolis [4], According to these data, chemical analysis of melted snow was conducted by ICP-MS, ICP-AES and ion chromatography using certified reference materials SLRS-2 of the National Research Council (Canada) and NIST, 1643c (US) [2], Statistical analysis of these data revealed that... 

The following hypotheses was tested in the first approximation if the vaporization of volatile oxides, sulfides, and metals of all the considered chemical elements at roasting and/or conversion temperature plays a significant role in the contamination of Karabash atmosphere, their calculated equilibrium pressure over the Cu-concentrate, slag, matte or copper melt (or their chemical composition) should strongly correlate with the detected abundance of these elements in snow samples. If such a significant correlation is detected, the corresponding process exerts primary... 

The MWCNT-filled polystyrene composites have good electromagnetic interference shielding properties (Snow and Perkins, 2005). The shielding effectiveness of MWCNT-filled composites was frequency independent, and increased with the... 

In the last decades, several ice cores over 1,000 m depth have been recovered from Greenland and Antarctica. In these cores, seasonal variations are generally observed only for the uppermost portions. After a certain depth, which depends on accumulation rates, seasonal variations disappear completely and isotopic changes reflect long-term climatic variations. No matter how thin a sample one cuts from the ice core, its isotope composition will represent a mean value of several years of snow deposition. 

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