Accelerator Mass Spectrometry at Arizona: Geochronology of the Climatic Record and Connections with the Ocean

Abstract

There are many diverse uses of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). ¹⁴C studies at our laboratory include much research related to paleoclimate, with ¹⁴C as a tracer of past changes in environmental conditions as observed in corals, marine sediments, and many terrestrial records. Terrestrial records can also show the influence of oceanic oscillations, whether they are short term, such as ENSO (El Niño/Southern Oscillation), or on the millennial time scale. In tracer applications, we have developed the use of ¹²⁹I as well as ¹⁴C as tracers for nuclear pollution studies around radioactive waste dump sites, in collaboration with IAEA. We discuss some applications carried out in Tucson, AZ, for several of these fields and hope to give some idea of the breadth of these studies.