Contains Vostok Ice Core Data for 420,000 Years.  The data covers the last 4 ice age cycles.  Data can be used to study natural atmospheric gas levels, dust levels, and natural variation in temperatures. The natural variations over the last 4 ice ages would be useful for comparison to the anthropogenic climate-change data available for the modern industrial period. The dataset contains information on GT4 ice core chronology (gas and ice chronology), Deuterium and reconstructed temperature, Dust content, Sodium concentrations, CO2, CH4, atmospheric oxygen composition.   The original text files were reformated by removing header information and converting to CSV format.

Acknowledgements

This dataset was published by the "World Data Center for Paleoclimatology" on the "NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information" (NCEI) site. "The World Data Center for Paleoclimatology" is one of 52 World Data Centers that house a wide range of solar, geophysical, environmental, and human dimensions data, and the only World Data Center devoted to paleoclimatic data. They follow standardized guidelines for data archive and distribution developed by the International Council for Scientific Unions (ICSU), supporting the ICSU goal to strengthen international science for the benefit of society, and making all data freely available without restriction. For all users of the data, they have two requests. First, please cite the original publications when using this data, because this credit is essential to the scientific endeavor. Second, please notify them with problems associated with the data, so that the corrections will benefit others.

Original reference

Petit J.R., Jouzel J., Raynaud D., Barkov N.I.,Barnola J.M., Basile I., Bender M., Chappellaz J., Davis J., Delaygue G.,
Delmotte M., Kotlyakov V.M., Legrand M., Lipenkov V., Lorius C., Pépin L., Ritz C., Saltzman E., Stievenard M., 1999,
Climate and Atmospheric History of the Past 420,000 years from the Vostok Ice Core, Antarctica, Nature, 399, pp.429-436.