AbstractsEarth & Environmental Science

The Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the world during the last decades of global warming. Reasons for the amplified Arctic warming are thought to partly relate to positive feedbacks affecting the radiative budget of the area. Black carbon (BC) is a light-absorbing particulate produced by incomplete combustion of biomass and fossil fuels. BC strongly warms the atmosphere, and its climate effects are amplified in the Arctic where its deposition on light surfaces decreases their reflectivity, resulting in elevated heat absorption and further hastening melt of snow and ice. Globally, BC is estimated to be the second most important climate-warming agent after carbon dioxide. Historical information on BC deposition plays a significant role in the assessment of long-term climate effects of BC, but scarce data on this past variability has been available from the Arctic. Historical BC records can be attained from environmental archives, such as ice cores, peat deposits and marine and lake sediments, which store direct evidence of past BC deposition in chronological order. The objective of this thesis is to collect new spatial and temporal data on BC deposition in the European Arctic from the preindustrial to the present (i.e., the last ca. 300 years), and assess BC sources and climatic implications, by analysing five lake sediment cores from Arctic Finland and an ice core from Svalbard. No standard method exists to determine BC, and the precise definition of BC depends on the methodology used for its quantification. Here, three different analytical methods were used to quantify different components of BC. Spheroidal Carbonaceous Particles (SCP) and soot-BC (SBC) were analysed from the Arctic Finland lake sediments by SCP analysis and chemothermal oxidation at 375 °C, respectively, and elemental carbon (EC) from the Svalbard ice core with a thermal optical method. The results suggest temporal variation in past BC trends, both between study sites and between methods. While SCPs show a marked trend with fluxes peaking around 1980 and declining afterwards, they represent only a minor fraction of total BC. SBC and EC are better suited to indicate general historical BC trends. SBC fluxes vary between sites but some regional patterns are noticeable. The two northernmost lakes indicate generally decreasing SBC fluxes during the latter half of the 20th century which is in line with previous data from Greenland ice cores, modelling studies and atmospheric measurements. However, two other lake sites indicate increasing SBC fluxes from ca. 1970 to the end of the records, likely caused by local emissions from the Kola Peninsula, Russia. Moreover, an increasing EC deposition trend from ca. 1970 to 2004 is also recorded in the Svalbard ice core. This increasing trend is unexpected and unparalleled among available arctic records. The observed increase in the ice core is likely caused by flaring emissions from northern Russia. The fact that a similar trend in BC fluxes and deposition is recorded in two separate…