Detailed tritium data of 3 pits drilled at Vostok station

Although tritium (³H or T), a nuclide naturally produced mainly in the stratosphere and rapidly entering the water cycle as HTO, seems a first‐rate tracer to study these processes, tritium data are very sparse in this region.

We present the first high‐resolution measurements of tritium concentration over the last 50 years in three snow pits drilled at the Vostok station. Natural variability of the tritium records reveals two prominent frequencies, one at about 10 years (to be related to the solar Schwabe cycles) and the other one at a shorter periodicity: despite dating uncertainty at this short scale, a good correlation is observed between ³H and Na⁺ and an anticorrelation between ³H and δ18O measured on an individual pit.