Agenda

Speakers: Pascal Bohleber and Piers Larkman, DAIS

Abstract:
Ongoing efforts to retrieve a 1.5 million year old continuous record from Antarctica mark the latest icon in international ice core drilling. In the lowermost ice parts, we hope to find crucial new insight regarding the cause of the “Mid-Pleistocene Transition”, an enigmatic reorganization in our climate system. Properly deciphering the climatic signals in deep ice is a key task in order to succeed, calling for a careful assessment of post-depositional processes that can alter the original layer stratigraphy.

Due to its micron-scale resolution and micro-destructiveness, laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is especially suited for the analysis of the oldest and highly thinned sections of polar ice cores. At Ca' Foscari University of Venice, we recently introduced state-of-the-art 2D imaging by LA-ICP-MS to ice cores. By adding the chemical dimension to the visual analysis of the ice core microstratigraphy the micron-resolution images create new demand for introducing techniques in automated image analysis and computer vision. Thanks to the fruitful collaboration with our colleagues in Computer Science at Ca’ Foscari, first examples already show how automated image analysis can provide a breakthrough in fully exploiting the rich set of information comprised in the chemical images. This concerns the relationship between impurities and the ice matrix as well as the paleoclimate significance of profiles along the main core axis. Accordingly, it is the right time to spark an intensified exchange among the two scientific communities of computer vision and ice core science.