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A New 13C Correction for Radiocarbon Samples from Elevated-CO2 Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

Margaret S Torn  and
John Southon
Margaret S Torn
Affiliation:
Earth Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MS 90-1116, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. Email: [email protected]
John Southon
Affiliation:
Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550, USA
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Abstract

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Radiocarbon can be a valuable tracer of carbon cycling in elevated CO2 experiments. However, the standard method of calculating Δ14C, which corrects sample 14C activity for isotopic fractionation by correcting the sample δ13C to – 25‰, introduces significant errors to the reported 14C values. For elevated-CO2 treatments the error arises because the δ13C of the sample is not an appropriate measure of isotopic fractionation to use when correcting sample 14C activity for isotopic fractionation. A suggested replacement approach, developed in this paper, is to use the δ13C of the same type of material (e.g. leaf, soil organic matter) from the control (ambient-CO2) treatment in place of the sample δ13C in the correction.

Type
I. Our ‘Dry’ Environment: Above Sea Level
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 43 , Issue 2B: Proceedings of the 17th International Radiocarbon Conference (Part 2 of 3), Conference Editors: Israel Carmi, Elisabetta Boaretto , 2001 , pp. 691 - 694
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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