Illimani99 firn-core (Bolivia, 6300 m) refractory black carbon record over the past 13,000 years

The glacier on Illimani in the eastern Bolivian Altiplano is one of the few in the mid- to low-latitudes giving access to ice covering the entire Holocene. The impurity and stable isotope in water records extracted from the Illimani ice core contain information on the composition of the past atmosphere and climate conditions over time. Here we provide a continuous record of concentrations refractory black carbon (rBC) from a 139 m deep core drilled in 1999 named Illimani99 (Bolivia, 16°37′S, 67°46′W, 6300 m) encompassing the period from 13 ka BP to 1999 CE. Major ions (Na+, Ca2+, SO42-) were determined at the Paul Scherrer Institute for the upper 33 m (1965-1999 CE) using ion-chromatography (850 Professional IC, Metrohm), and rBC was analyzed over the entire core (in 3070 discrete samples) with a Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2, Droplet Measurement Technologies) and a jet (APEX-Q, Elemental Scientific Inc.) nebulizer to aerosolize the aqueous samples (Osmont et al., 2019). The depth-age model is described in Sigl et al. (2009) and Kellerhals et al. (2010). This dataset underpins analyses of anthropogenic and natural emissions of aerosol species over the industrial (Liu et al., 2021) and pre-industrial periods (Osmont et al., 2019; Brugger et al., 2019).