Age and stability of sublimation till over buried glacier ice, inferred from 21Ne measurements, Ong Valley, Antarctica

Abstract:

Ong Valley, in the Central Transantarctic Mountains, contains three distinct glacial drifts deposited by past advances of the Argosy glacier into the valley. Massive ice occurs below two of the till deposits. Potentially, such buried ice under shallow regolith cover could provide access to past climate and biological records more easily than deep ice coring. We measured cosmic-ray produced ²¹Ne in these tills as a means of constraining the age and stability of the three drifts, as well as the ice below them. We collected samples in vertical profiles from two hand-dug sections through each drift. The pits from two drifts overlying buried ice extended to the buried ice surface. The hypothesis that these are sublimation tills implies that ²¹Ne concentrations are a function of i) any inheritance from prior exposure; ii) the age since emplacement of the ice and till; iii) the sublimation rate of the ice; and iv) the surface erosion rate of the till.

²¹Ne concentrations in the youngest drift are ca. 10 M atoms/g and invariant with depth, indicating that they are predominantly due to inheritance, and provide only a weak maximum age constraint of ca. 0.1 Mya. The two older drifts have surface ²¹Ne concentrations of 200-250 M atoms/ g and depth concentration profiles consistent with a sublimation till origin. Given that ²¹Ne concentrations in the deepest samples in each of the two older drifts provide an upper limit on the inherited ²¹Ne concentration, these imply minimum ages of 1 Mya for the middle drift and 1.6 Mya for the oldest. This implies a 1 Mya minimum age for the ice underlying the middle drift.