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Analyses

 

Analyses are performed for investigations in a broad range of research disciplines.

  • The largest class of applications concerns radiocarbon dating such as settlements, art and religious objects in archaeology, sedimentation and geochemistry in geology, landscape evolution in geography. To a smaller extent 14C-analyses are applied to trace contributions of pollutant gases in the atmosphere.

  • Analyses of 10Be are applied to deep-sea sediments and manganese nodules to retrieve chronologies on a million-year timescale. However, the 10Be accumulation in sediments depends on chemical conditions of the water column, which affects the reliability as a dating tool. In conjunction with radiocarbon dating, which does not have this problem, 10Be is used to trace variations in the conditions.

  • Analyses of  10Be, 26Al and 36Cl are applied to samples of bedrock and of meteorites. For meteorites, the remaining radionuclide concentration is used to retrieve its terrestrial age. For bedrock, the radionuclide concentration is accumulated from exposure to cosmic rays, especially at high altitudes.

We contribute to the development of the following applications.

  • Dating of mortar
    mortar is dated through pieces of charcoal, presumably introduced during production; the dates established the chronology for the Jewish graves in Rome starting at about 0 AD (about 300 years earlier than assumed).

  • Dating of human bones
    complications in dating of human bones are observed through the aging effect of about 100 years of skeletons of historically known persons.

  • Tracing sea level changes
    attempts are made to disentangle possible sea level changes in the past from detailed series of radiocarbon dates of marsh plants grown in open connection with the sea.

  • Dating Antarctic ice
    14C in situ production in Antarctic ice is studied for retrieval of ice dynamical parameters (accumulation rate, ablation rate) and for establishing a correction procedure to be used for dating of Antarctic ice with the trapped carbon dioxide.

  • Tracing anthropogenic pollution
    the fossil origin of man-made pollutants as carbonyls is a handle to trace their origin on the hand of air samples.