Banded corals: changes in oceanic carbon-14 during the little ice age

Radiocarbon analyses and stable isotope measurements are presented foro recent cores of banded corals from the Florida Straits. These values provide a record of variations in the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the dissolved inorganic carbon in the surface waters of the Gulf Stream from A.D. 1642 to 1800. An increase in the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio of 7 per mil for coral growth during the early 1700's was most likely induced by an increase in the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio of 20 per mil in the atmospheric carbon dioxide that occurred at about 1700. The ratios of oxygen 18 to oxygen-16 in these coral bands show a small decrease of a water temperature ( approximately 1 degrees C) during the latter part of the Little Ice Age (1700 to 1725). These results support the hypothesis that the increase in atmospheric carbon-14 at about 1700, and possibly the temperature change as well, was caused by a decrease in solar activity (Maunder sunspot minimum).     

Cosmic-Ray Exposure Age of the Farmington Meteorite from Radioactive Isotopes

The cosmic-ray exposure age of the Farmington meteorite was found to be greater than 7000 years from the ratio of the carbon-14 and argon-39 present and less than 25,000 years from the ratio of the aluminum-26 and argon-39 present. This exposure age is about an order of magnitude smaller than was estimated previously.     

Middle holocene age of the sunnyvale human skeleton

A morphologically modern human skeleton from Sunnyvale, California, previously dated by aspartic acid racemization to be approximately 70,000 years old and by uranium series isotopic ratios to be 8300 and 9000 years old, appears to be younger when dated by the carbon-14 method. Four carbon-14 determinations made by both decay and direct counting on three organic fractions of postcranial bone support a middle Holocene age assignment for the skeleton, probably in the range of 3500 to 5000 carbon-14 years before the present. This dating evidence is consistent with the geologic, archeological, and anthropometric relationships of the burial as well as previously determined carbon-14 determinations on associated materials.     

Man-made carbon-14 in deep Pacific waters: transport by biological skeletal material

Calcareous particles present in Pacific waters at depths of 50 to 3500 meters were collected by filtering seawater through spongin matrix. The specific activity of carbon-14 could be measured in two of these collections from depths of 2300 and 3500 meters. The ratios of carbon-14 to carbon-12 correspond to values observed in surface waters in recent years as a result of the addition of manmade carbon-14, thus indicating that the calcareous particles resulted from recent biological productivity. The results are related to the mean settling rates and the sizes and dissolution rates of biogenic calcareous particles in transit through a seawater column.     

Earthquake dating: an application of carbon-14 atom counting

Milligram-sized specimens of detrital charcoal from soil layers associated with prehistoric earthquakes on the Wasatch fault in Utah have been dated by direct atom counting of carbon-14 with a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator. The measured ratios of carbon-14 to carbon-12 correspond to ages of 7800, 8800, and 9000 years with uncertainties of +/- 600 years.     

Synchronous radiocarbon and climate shifts during the last deglaciation

Radiocarbon data from the Cariaco Basin provide calibration of the carbon-14 time scale across the period of deglaciation (15,000 to 10, 000 years ago) with resolution available previously only from Holocene tree rings. Reconstructed changes in atmospheric carbon-14 are larger than previously thought, with the largest change occurring simultaneously with the sudden climatic cooling of the Younger Dryas event. Carbon-14 and published beryllium-10 data together suggest that concurrent climate and carbon-14 changes were predominantly the result of abrupt shifts in deep ocean ventilation.     

Post-bomb rise in radiocarbon activity in Denmark

During the summers of 1958 and 1959 the increase in concentration of bomb-produced radiocarbon in Denmark was several percent higher than the average increase for the hemisphere. This additional increase is probably a carbon-14 equivalent to the spring peaks in strontium-90 fallout in the North Temperate Zone in the same years, and suggests latitudinal variations in carbon-14 contamination.     

Glacier in Chile Ended a Major Readvance about 36,000 Years Ago: Some Global Comparisons

About 36,000 carbon-14 years ago, a glacier in southern Chile reached the culmination of a major readvance. Severe global cooling at about that time, preceded and followed by warmer conditions, is implied also by other glacial, floral, and some oceanographic evidence, but not by other oceanographic evidence nor by studies of past eustatic sea levels. Severe global cooling at about that time is incompatible with the Milankovitch theory of climatic change.     

Genetic and somatic effects of carbon-14

On the basis of information about carbon-14 given by Libby, calculations are made of the predicted genetic and somatic effects of the carbon-14 produced by the testing of nuclear weapons. It is concluded that 1 year of testing (30 megatons of fission plus fusion) is expected to cause in the world (stimated future number of births per year 5 times the present number) an estimated total of about 55,000 children with gross physical or mental defects, 170,000 stillbirths and childhood deaths, and 425,000 embryonic and neonatal deaths. (There is an unknown amount of overlap of these three categories.) These numbers are about 17 times the numbers usually estimated as the probable effects of the fallout fission products from 1 year of testing. In addition, the somatic effects of bomb-test carbon-14 are expected to be about equal to those of fission products, including strontium-90, with respect to leukemia and bone cancer and greater than those of fission products with respect to diseases resulting from radiation damage to tissues other than bone tissue and bone marrow. All of the estimated numbers are subject to great uncertainty; they may be as much as 5 times too high or 5 times too low. The uncertainty in the estimation of the relative effects of carbon-14 and fission products in world-wide fallout is not so great.     

Atmospheric radiocarbon calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: late glacial fluctuations and cosmogenic isotope production

More than 250 carbon-14 accelerator mass spectrometry dates of terrestrial macrofossils from annually laminated sediments from Lake Suigetsu (Japan) provide a first atmospheric calibration for almost the total range of the radiocarbon method (45,000 years before the present). The results confirm the (recently revised) floating German pine chronology and are consistent with data from European and marine varved sediments, and combined uranium-thorium and carbon-14 dating of corals up to the Last Glacial Maximum. The data during the Glacial show large fluctuations in the atmospheric carbon-14 content, related to changes in global environment and in cosmogenic isotope production.     

Upper wisconsinan till recovered on the continental shelf southeast of new England

Basal till was identified in two sediment cores collected about 69 kilometers southeast of Nantucket Island on the east and west sides of Great South Channel. These are the first samples of till collected on the outer continental shelf off the northeastern United States. The carbon-14 age of the total organic carbon in the tills provides a "no older than" age of about 20,000 years before present and suggests that the tills were deposited during the late Wisconsinan glaciation. This conclusion is in support of the hypothesis of an extensive Laurentide ice sheet that extended to the northern side of Georges Bank.     

Chronology of hawaiian glaciations

Both potassium/argon and carbon-14 ages of lava flows and tephra layers interstratified with glacial deposits on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, indicate that four episodes of ice cap glaciation culminated about 20,000, 55,000, 135,000, and 250,000 years ago. These episodes are correlated with marine isotope stages 2, 4, 6, and 8, marking times of high global ice volume.     

Thyroxine: convesion to triiodothyronine by isolated perfused rat heart

Thyroxine labeled with carbon-14 and iodine-125 was perfused through surviving rat hearts. Only when unlabeled triiodothyronine was added as a carrier could the newly formed doubly labeled triiodothyronine be isolated. The fact that this triiodothyronine was labeled with the correct ratio of carbon-14 to iodine-125 indicated that it originated from thyroxine. Approximately 5 percent of the initial carbon-14 radioactivity was found in the recovered triiodothyronine.     

Carbon-14 time scale extended: comparison of chronologies

Thermal diffusion isotopic enrichment of carbon-14 has extended the radiocarbon dating range to about 75,000 years ago. Twenty-eight samples obtained up to June 1976, mainly from northwest Europe, were dated. Consideration of the basic assumptions of carbon-14 dating and of the sources of contamination indicates that the ages are generally reliable. Together with the pollen analytic and stratigraphic the dates yield a more detailed radiocarbon time scale for climatic variations in northwest Europe, showing three early glacial interstades. The radiocarbon time scale agrees with the Camp Century chronology and with the thorium-230 ages of corals representing high sea level stands on New Guinea. Ther is a discrepancy between the radiocarbon time scale and the deep-sea chronology, which may be due to correlation errors. With a modified interpretation of the correlation, all four time scales agree within the estimated experimental uncertainties of the dating techniques used.     

Phytolith evidence for early Holocene Cucurbita domestication in southwest Ecuador

Cucurbita (squash and gourd) phytoliths recovered from two early Holocene archaeological sites in southwestern Ecuador and directly dated to 10,130 to 9320 carbon-14 years before the present (about 12,000 to 10,000 calendar years ago) are identified as derived from domesticated plants because they are considerably larger than those from modern wild taxa. The beginnings of plant husbandry appear to have been preceded by the exploitation of a wild species of Cucurbita during the terminal Pleistocene. These data provide evidence for an independent emergence of plant food production in lowland South America that was contemporaneous with or slightly before that in highland Mesoamerica.     

Quebrada jaguay: early south american maritime adaptations

Excavations at Quebrada Jaguay 280 (QJ-280) (16 degrees30'S) in south coastal Peru demonstrated that Paleoindian-age people of the Terminal Pleistocene (about 11,100 to 10,000 carbon-14 years before the present or about 13,000 to 11,000 calibrated years before the present) in South America relied on marine resources while resident on the coast, which extends the South American record of maritime exploitation by a millennium. This site supports recent evidence that Paleoindian-age people had diverse subsistence systems. The presence of obsidian at QJ-280 shows that the inhabitants had contact with the adjacent Andean highlands during the Terminal Pleistocene.     

Tritium and carbon-14 distributions in seawater from under the ross ice shelf project ice hole

The tritium and carbon-14 activities of seawater samples collected from 22 to 200 meters below the ice at the Ross Ice Shelf Project ice hole are reported. The tritium results show that the waters below the ice have exchanged with Ross Sea water since the advent of nuclear testing. The carbon-14 results indicate that waters in the upper layer exchange in time periods of less than 6 years. Measurements of these isotopes in seawater under the Ross Ice Shelf in McMurdo Sound show that this water has a different history.     

Bacterioplankton: a sink for carbon in a coastal marine plankton community

Recent determinations of high production rates (up to 30 percent of primary production in surface waters) implicate free-living marine bacterioplankton as a link in a "microbial loop" that supplements phytoplankton as food for herbivores. An enclosed water column of 300 cubic meters was used to test the microbial loop hypothesis by following the fate of carbon-14-labeled bacterioplankton for over 50 days. Only 2 percent of the label initially fixed from carbon-14-labeled glucose by bacteria was present in larger organisms after 13 days, at which time about 20 percent of the total label added remained in the particulate fraction. Most of the label appeared to pass directly from particles smaller than 1 micrometer (heterotrophic bacterioplankton and some bacteriovores) to respired labeled carbon dioxide or to regenerated dissolved organic carbon-14. Secondary (and, by implication, primary) production by organisms smaller than 1 micrometer may not be an important food source in marine food chains. Bacterioplankton can be a sink for carbon in planktonic food webs and may serve principally as agents of nutrient regeneration rather than as food.     

Late Mousterian persistence near the Arctic Circle

Palaeolithic sites in Russian high latitudes have been considered as Upper Palaeolithic and thus representing an Arctic expansion of modern humans. Here we show that at Byzovaya, in the western foothills of the Polar Urals, the technological structure of the lithic assemblage makes it directly comparable with Mousterian Middle Palaeolithic industries that so far have been exclusively attributed to the Neandertal populations in Europe. Radiocarbon and optical-stimulated luminescence dates on bones and sand grains indicate that the site was occupied during a short period around 28,500 carbon-14 years before the present (about 31,000 to 34,000 calendar years ago), at the time when only Upper Palaeolithic cultures occupied lower latitudes of Eurasia. Byzovaya may thus represent a late northern refuge for Neandertals, about 1000 km north of earlier known Mousterian sites.     

碳-14考古断代原理

放射性元素碳 - 1 4的半衰期为 5 730年。自然界中活着的生物体中碳 - 1 4含量应为定值 ,生物死亡之后 ,碳 - 1 4含量按一定规律衰减。考古学家根据死亡后生物体内碳 - 1 4含量相对于其原始量的变化来断定它所属年代。