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Findings from an in-depth annual tree-ring radiocarbon intercomparison

Abstract
The radiocarbon (¹⁴C) calibration curve so far contains annually resolved data only for a short period of time. With accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) matching the precision of decay counting, it is now possible to efficiently produce large datasets of annual resolution for calibration purposes using small amounts of wood. The radiocarbon intercomparison on single-year tree-ring samples presented here is the first to investigate specifically possible offsets between AMS laboratories at high precision. The results show that AMS laboratories are capable of measuring samples of Holocene age with an accuracy and precision that is comparable or even goes beyond what is possible with decay counting, even though they require a thousand times less wood. It also shows that not all AMS laboratories always produce results that are consistent with their stated uncertainties. The long-term benefits of studies of this kind are more accurate radiocarbon measurements with, in the future, better quantified uncertainties.
Type
Journal Article
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
Wacker, L., Scott, E. M., Bayliss, A., Brown, D., Bard, E., Bollhalder, S., … Tuna, T. (2020). Findings from an in-depth annual tree-ring radiocarbon intercomparison. Radiocarbon, 62(4), 873–882. https://doi.org/10.1017/rdc.2020.49
Date
2020
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Degree
Supervisors
Rights
© The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 2020. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.