Mineral dust archived in polar ice provides important insight into our paleoclimate: geochemical and size analysis of dust particles allows to reconstruct atmospheric circulation and to infer changes in ice sheet size, as exposed ice sheet margins result in additional local source areas. Consequently, dust analysis plays an important role in the investigation of abrupt climate changes in Greenland ice cores and, on longer time scales, in the ongoing efforts to study the deepest and oldest layers of Antarctic ice. At the same time, ice core scientists find increasing evidence of post-depositional changes altering dust size through cluster formation and dust geochemical signatures through precipitation and dissolution of individual minerals. Hence, it is paramount to better understand glacier ice in its role as a “geochemical reactor” to avoid misinterpretation of climate proxies, such as dust. Mapping the spatial distribution of aerosol-related impurities in ice by laser ablation inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) provides a unique tool to investigate the location, composition and size of dust particles in the ice. Laboratory experiments on artificial ice play an important role in this regard, for calibration and the exemplary investigation of individual reactions. Since the physical size of the LA-ICP-MS maps remains limited to some mm2 so far, single-particle “time-of-flight” ICP-MS (SP-ICP-TOFMS) performed on small-volume melted samples adds a crucial complementary dimension to this framework. We employed both techniques on the same samples from Greenland and Antarctica, capturing different climate periods and thus dust concentrations, allowing a quantitative comparison between the micro-structural localization of impurities in ice with LA-ICP-MS and the bulk soluble versus insoluble elemental fraction with SP-ICP-TOFMS. This way we can finally test hypotheses on geochemical reactions happening to alkaline dust within the acidic environment formed at grain (crystal) boundaries. Applied in an analogue way to study variability along the main core axis, this approach can decipher time-resolved changes in dust content, size and mineralogy encoding paleoclimate and spatial variability. Ultimately this illustrates how the two complementary techniques LA-ICP-MS and SP-ICP-TOFMS can join forces to elucidate dust-related paleoclimate signals in ice cores at a new level of detail.