Ice stored in glaciers or ice caves is an archive that gives us direct access to the chemical and isotopic composition of past precipitation. We can construct tritium time series, that we can use to determine the age of the ice, and to study various atmospheric processes. This project addresses the following research questions:

1. Confirmation of the link between the solar cycle and the tritium content of uncontaminated precipitation (in ice layers accumulated before the nuclear bomb tests);
2. Verification of those atmospheric general circulation models where tritium and solar cycle are embedded in the model;
3. Determination of the natural level of tritium in the atmosphere comparing recent level of tritium to the pre-bomb tritium.

Study sites in the project include glaciers in the Swiss-Italian Alps, Greenland, Tibet, Kyrgyzstan, and ice caves in Romania, Slovenia, Macedonia, as well as other potential sites where suitable accumulation rates of ice have been determined.

Budget: 18,000 EUR