Speaker
Description
The long-lived noble-gas isotope 81Kr is the ideal tracer for old water and ice with ages of 0.1 – 1 million years, a range beyond the reach of 14C. 81Kr-dating, a concept pursued over the past six decades, is now available to the earth science community at large. This is made possible by the development of the Atom Trap Trace Analysis (ATTA) method, in which individual atoms of the desired isotope are captured and detected. ATTA possesses superior selectivity, and is thus far used to analyze the environmental radioactive isotopes 85Kr, 39Ar, 41Ca, and 81Kr. These isotopes have extremely low isotopic abundances in the range of 10^-17 to 10^-11, and cover a wide range of ages and applications. In collaboration with earth scientists, we are dating groundwater and mapping its flow in major aquifers around the world, and dating old ice from the deep ice cores of Antarctica, Greenland, and the Tibetan Plateau. For an update on this worldwide effort, please google “ATTA Primer”.
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