Achievement

During the Summer 2011 Greenland Field Seminar, trainees Fey, Welker, Lauder, Kopec, and Lany supported IGERT faculty Osterberg's research tracking potential radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear accident. Trainees learned ultra clean sampling techniques and collected surface snow samples from pits dug at Summit, Greenland. Dartmouth samples track potential radioactive fallout in snow, and radiocesium was concentrated and isolated from the snow pit meltwater. Summit data are being compared with samples from Thule, Greenland, and Denali Park, Alaska. The source of the radiation emission from the power plant is well constrained in time and space, providing an opportunity to better understand long-range atmospheric transport processes from Asia to the Arctic, while also assessing the magnitude of the fallout in the Arctic. We are evaluating the potential to use the Fukushima fallout horizon as an absolute time marker in future Arctic ice core studies.