The Akademii Nauk ice core and solar activity

Ice cores are well-established archives for paleo-environmental studies, but this requires a reliable ice core chronology. The concentration of cosmogenic radionuclides in ice cores reflects the solar activity in the past and, thus, can be used as a dating tool for ice cores. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) allows the determination of nuclides in high resolution. Here, we present results of a ¹⁰Be study in an ice core from Akademii Nauk (Severnaya Zemlya, Russian Arctic). AMS analyses of more than 500 samples were carried out using the 6 MV accelerator facility of the Ion Beam Center of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. For the time period 400 to 2000 CE the temporal variations of ¹⁰Be reflect the centennial variations of solar activity known from similar studies of Greenlandic ice cores and from ¹⁴C production reconstructions. The ¹⁰Be peak of 775 CE, today understood as result of the strongest known solar particle storm, was found by high-resolution core analysis. This peak is used as a tie point (additionally to volcanic reference horizons) for the development of the depth-age relationship of the Akademii Nauk ice core. Indications of the so called “Carrington Event” of 1859 CE, 20 to 30 times weaker than 775 CE, could also be detected in the core.