摘要：Ice cores provide a unique opportunity to access the past composition of the Earth's atmosphere. Up to now methane concentration measurements have been made on individual ice samples. Such work is laborious and it took two decades to obtain the methane data for the com-posite record shown in Figure 1A.Initially chemical measurements were also obtained from individual ice samples. During the 1990s a methodology known as Continuous Flow Analyses was invent-ed and has been further developed since (Bigler et al. 2011; Kaufmann et al. 2008). This method is based on the continuous melting of a section of the ice core. The meltwater is then split and diverted into detectors specific to the chemical ion spe-cies to be analyzed. In this way a large range of chemical components can be an-alyzed directly at the ice core drill site. Note that for these chemical measurements, a debubbler unit is required to remove the air from the ice (on the order of 10% by volume) since the air would hamper the chemical analysis. It has been a long-term ambition to measure the gas composition of ice cores using a similar methodology. The University of Bern, Switzerland, has developed such a system
