Development of sediment chronologies with amino acid radiocarbon dating

Abstract

Radiocarbon is a crucial method for determining the age of sediments less than 50,000 years old. The compound-specific radiocarbon dating technique was developed by Dr Timothy Eglinton at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US, who is currently a Professor at ETH Zurich. The project discussed in this article focuses on applying the compound-specific radiocarbon dating technique to enable the construction of chronologies of sediments from the Antarctic Ocean. In half of the sea floor, the sediment does not contain calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which has been routinely used for the radiocarbon dating for constructing sediment chronologies. In such sediments compound-specific radiocarbon dating is useful for constructing chronologies. Furthermore, it can be used for constructing chronologies of lake sediments that are generally hard to determine due to lack of CaCO3. Without chronology, nothing can be correlated with events occurred at one place to other places. Chronology is a fundamental tool for helping to draw a whole view of the events which occurred before letters were invented, including geological, climatological and anthropogenic events. ‘When did it happen?’ is still a major question for historical science to answer and the project discussed in this article takes a further step towards this goal.

Journal

Title: Impact

Abbreviated Title: impact

Publisher: Science Impact, Ltd.

ISSN (Print): 2398-7073

Publication date Created: December 18 2017

Publication date (Print): December 18 2017

Volume: 2017

Issue: 11

Pages: 33-35

Article

DOI: 10.21820/23987073.2017.11.33

Copyright statement: © 2017

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Product

Self URI (article page): http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/10.21820/23987073.2017.11.33