BLOWSEA: Blowing snow and sea ice surfaces as a source of polar sea salt aerosol

The concentration of salt in ice cores has been proposed as a sea ice proxy for use in assessing past climate - several lines of evidence suggest that sea salt aerosol generated from the sublimation of blowing snow over sea ice is the major source of salt in the cores. While this has been applied by a number of studies of past climate, without quantification of the source it is difficult to specify exactly what aspect of sea ice is being recorded within the ice core. This study will characterise the rate of production of sea-salt aerosol from the evaporation of blowing snow over sea ice and provide a means to quantify the deposition rate to glacial ice in the past and thus constrain past climate conditions inferred from the salt concentration in ice cores. BLOWSEA is led by Eric Wolf at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in collaboration with Anna Jones (BAS), Phil Anderson (SAMS), and John Pyle and Xin Yang (University of Cambridge).