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Radiocarbon Dating of Deep-Sea Sediments: A Comparison of Accelerator Mass Spectrometer and Beta-Decay Methods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

G A Jones
Affiliation:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543
A J T Jull
Affiliation:
NSF-Arizona Accelerator Facility for Radioisotope Analysis Department of Physics, University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721
T W Linick
Affiliation:
NSF-Arizona Accelerator Facility for Radioisotope Analysis Department of Physics, University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721
D J Donahue
Affiliation:
NSF-Arizona Accelerator Facility for Radioisotope Analysis Department of Physics, University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721
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Radiocarbon dating (Libby, 1955) has been an important tool in the marine sciences since the early 1950s (eg, Arrhenius, Kjellberg & Libby, 1951; Ericson et al, 1956; Broecker, Ewing & Heezen, 1960; Emery & Bray, 1962) and the basic principles and analytic procedures of the method have changed little. In the late 1970s, the Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) method of 14C dating was developed (Bennett et al, 1977, 1978), the major advantages being that samples several thousand times smaller than needed for beta-decay counting can be dated, and analysis time is reduced to ca 1 hr from the 1–6 days needed for beta-decay methods.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The American Journal of Science 

References

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