Nitrate Plus Nitrite Concentrations in a Himalayan Ice Core

The measurement of chemical constituents in glacial ice has been useful in discerning historic trends in chemical deposition and hence paleo-atmospheric records in remote areas (Thompson and Mosley - Thompson, 1981; Johnson and Chamberlain, 1981; Ng and Patterson, 1981; Neftel et al., 1982). However, delineating the sources of the deposited chemical species in question is not always straightforward. This has been especially true for nitrate. Although it is now believed that man-made emissions are responsible for a high percentage of nitrate being deposited in remote areas of the Northern Hemisphere, numerous natural sources, named and unnamed, have also contributed to the precipitated nitrate burden in these regions (Risbo et al., 1981; Herron, 1982). Most of the data available for glacial ice has been obtained from polar glaciers. We present nitrate plus nitrite data froma 16.6m core collected at 4908m on Sentik Glacier in the Nun Kun portion of the Ladakh Himalayas, India. To our knowledge this is the longest record of nitrate concentrations reported from an alpine glacie