Source of major anions and cations of snowpacks in Hailuogou No.1 glacier, Mt. Gongga and Baishui No.1 glacier, Mt. Yulong

Snowpacks samples were colleted from two glaciers: Baishui No.1 glacier and Hailuogou No.1 glacier in June, 2006. The method of sea-salt ions tracer, correlation analysis and trend analysis were used in this research in order to confirm the source of main ions, it is indicated that Na+ is mainly from marine moisture and other ions mainly originate from land dust. The non-marine source percent of Cl-, NO-3, SO2-4, K+, Ca2+ and Mg2+ is 52%, 99%, 100%, 98%, 99.9% and 83%, respectively, in Hailuogou No.1 glacier, while the corresponding value in Baishui No.1 glacier is 68%, 99%, 100%, 98%, 99% and 59%. The non-marine source of ions is from dust of Central Asia arid regions carried by westerly circulation and the plateau borne-areas with Qinghai-Tibet Plateau winter monsoon in two glacial areas. How-ever, the import of local dust in glacial area has made a great contribution to ions concentra-tion in Baishui No.1 glacier, which accounts for the reason why the ions concentration in Bai-shui No.1 glacier is much higher than that of Hailuogou No.1 glacier. It is obvious that the source of each ion is different between Hailuogou No.1 glacier and Baishui No.1 glacier. There are three reasons which can explain it: firstly, the difference in the internal environment of glacial area, such as lithology, mountain-valley wind system, topographical relief and so on; secondly, the influence exerted by ions elution in snowpacks section, and ions elution in Hailuogou No.1 glacier is very strong; and thirdly, the difference caused due to varying ions transporting styles, deposition modes, chemical characteristics and post-ions-deposition process.