This project is an effort to determine continental-scale and regional-scale sources of pollution aerosol collected at the GISP-2 and Dye-3 sites in Greenland. It will make use of a chemically-based source apportionment technique known as receptor modelling, which chemical signatures developed for regional-scale sources in North America and Eurasia are applied to the analyses of snow and ice samples. Geographically specific industrialized regions display characteristic patterns of trace element composition of their aerosol emissions, which include contributions from power plants, smelters, motor vehicles, biomass burning, etc. Some rely on anomalously high concentrations of exotic trace elements such as arsenic, indium, selenium, and vanadium, which are found in extremely low concentrations in Greenland. The project will make use of samples collected at the GISP-2 site during the past two seasons, and will collect additional samples in the summer of 1992.
