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A Note on Reporting of Reservoir 14C Disequilibria and Age Offsets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Guillaume Soulet ,
Luke C Skinner ,
Steven R Beaupré  and
Valier Galy
Guillaume Soulet*
Affiliation:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 266 Woods Hole Road, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA.
Luke C Skinner
Affiliation:
Godwin Laboratory for Palaeoclimate Research, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK.
Steven R Beaupré
Affiliation:
School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5000, USA.
Valier Galy
Affiliation:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 266 Woods Hole Road, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA.
*
*Corresponding author. Email: gsoulet@whoi.edu.
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Abstract

Reservoir age offsets are widely used to correct marine and speleothem radiocarbon age measurements for various calibration purposes. They also serve as a powerful tracer for carbon cycle dynamics. However, a clear terminology regarding reservoir age offsets is lacking, sometimes leading to miscalculations. This note seeks to provide consistent conventions for reporting reservoir 14C disequilibria useful to a broad range of environmental sciences. This contribution introduces the F14R and δ14R metrics to express the relative 14C disequilibrium between two contemporaneous reservoirs and the R metric as the associated reservoir age offset.

Keywords

reservoir agereservoir effectfreshwater effecthardwater effectventilation ageradiocarbon
Type
Research Article
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 58 , Supplement 1 , March 2016 , pp. 205 - 211
Copyright
© 2016 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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