Measuring Earth’s 4.5 Billion-Year History

Radiogenic and stable isotope geochemistry: isotopic systems and their applications in the Earth sciences.
Instructors: Profs. Terrence Blackburn and Jim Zachos.

Responsibilities

Script, record, and produce five 10-20 minute videos demonstrating isotope geochemistry laboratory methods and narrating the progression of a geochemical study. Collected isotopic data for students to interpret in final project. (Remote Instruction)

Topics Covered

Rock sample preparation, including wet chemistry methods (sample digestion and ion-exchange column chemistry), fundamentals of mass spectrometry, and various isotopic analysis methods: carbonate δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O by iRMS; carbonate ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr by TIMS; carbonate ²³⁰Th-²³²Th-²³⁴U-²³⁸U by ID-TIMS; water δD, δ¹⁷O, and δ¹⁸O by laser analyzer; and organic C and N abundance, δ¹³C, and δ¹⁵N by CN-EA-iRMS.