U-series dating of carbonates using inductively coupled plasma-quadrupole mass spectrometry

E. Hernández-Mendiola, J. P. Bernal*, E. Lounejeva, G. E. Mortimer, M. T. McCulloch

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    7 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We describe an analytical methodology to quantify 238U-234U and 230Th using isotope-dilution systematics and inductively coupled plasma-quadrupole mass spectrometry (ICP-QMS) for geochronological purposes. This required characterization of the mass spectrometer detector performance over a large dynamic range, including a careful calibration between pulse and analogue ion-counting modes. Our methodology gives an analytical precision for 234U/238U and 230Th/238U of 4‰ and 7‰ (2 × standard error), respectively, and yields 230Th-ages with 4-5% uncertainty from 500 ng of 238U. We tested our methodology by analyzing carbonate samples (corals and speleothems) which were previously dated using MC-ICPMS; excellent agreement between both techniques was obtained. Our results indicate that ICP-QMS is suitable to obtain valuable meaningful geochronological data, but it is limited to dating samples older than 1 ka, and younger than 400 ka. Our methodology thus represents an attractive alternative to obtain geochonological data to select the most interesting samples prior to high-precision analysis. Moreover, such data would also valuable to build preliminary age-models, which can be further complemented with high-precision analyses.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)564-573
    Number of pages10
    JournalQuaternary Geochronology
    Volume6
    Issue number6
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Dec 2011

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