Debrecen4U November 27, 2025

Debrecen researchers visited freezing cold landscapes

Researchers are studying the imprints of the solar cycle in ice, so they are visiting places that have been below freezing for a long time. They were most recently in Kyrgyzstan, but they have also visited Greenland.

Researchers from the HUN-REN Nuclear Research Institute (ATOMKI) recently returned from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, where they took ice core samples from snow layers accumulated over many years by drilling during an expedition. They are using the tritium isotope found in ice to study the effect of the magnetic activity of the central star, the Sun, on the Earth’s atmosphere.

The measurement results from previous expeditions were published this summer in the prestigious Journal of Geophysical Research, “Atmospheres.”

Similar to other cosmogenic isotopes, tritium is naturally produced in the Earth’s upper atmosphere by nuclear physics processes from nitrogen in the air as a result of cosmic radiation from space. The three forms of hydrogen behave the same chemically, so in a small fraction of water molecules, tritium is found instead of normal hydrogen. The tritium produced in the upper atmosphere falls as precipitation in the form of water and enters the Earth’s water cycle. In the form of snow, tritium, which falls in areas that are always cold, remains in place, and new layers of snow are added to it every year, thus creating a time series. A drilled sample taken from snow that has already solidified into ice deep down can be interrogated using appropriate measuring instruments.

ATOMKI expeditions visit places on Earth that have been continuously below freezing for a long time. Ice core samples have been taken in the highlands of the Alps, in Greenland, and most recently in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

The Greenland video is available to view here.

Source: dehir.hu | Photo credit:Pixabay (illustration)