Mutual changes in temperature and aerosol content in the atmosphere based on Antarctic ice core data for the last 800000 years

A comparative analysis of mutual changes in temperature and aerosol content in the atmosphere was carried out by the data of Antarctic ice cores obtained at the Russian Vostok station and within the framework of the international EPICA project for the past 800,000 years. According to the results of cross-wavelet analysis for the last hundreds of thousands of years, variations in the content of aerosol in the atmosphere, as well as in the content of greenhouse gases CO2 and CH4, are generally lagging relative to temperature changes for the glacial cycles that dominated within the past million years with periods of about 100 thousands years associated with change in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. At the same time, for shorter-term glacial cycles, opposite effects appear at certain time intervals with a delay in temperature variations relative to variations in the content of radiatively active components in the atmosphere, including marine and continental (dust) aerosol . In particular, the delay of temperature variations with respect to variations in the content of aerosol in the atmosphere (as well as with respect to variations in the content of methane in the atmosphere) manifests itself for modes associated with the obliquity changes with periods of about 40 thousands years.