A coral I-129/I-127 measurement method using ICP-MS and AMS with carrier addition

作者:Bautista Angel T*; Miyake Yasuto; Matsuzaki Hiroyuki; Siringan Fernando P
来源:Analytical Methods, 2017, 9(35): 5181-5188.
DOI:10.1039/c7ay01458a

摘要

Iodine-129 in coral cores provides historical records of human nuclear activities, establishes or confirms coral age models, and traces environmental processes. At the time of this writing, the only published method (Biddulph et al., 2006) for measuring I-129/(127)(stable) I in corals required 10-30 g of sample, which can be too large for common practice. To reduce this sample size requirement, we modified the existing method in two aspects: (1) we used inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) instead of an iodide selective electrode (ISE) for stable I-127 measurement; and (2) we added 0.66 mg of a low-ratio (I-129/I-127 = 1.5 x 10(-14)) iodine carrier instead of using a carrier-free method for target preparation for I-129 measurement by accelerator mass spectrometry. For I-127 measurement, we obtained the detection limit and limit of quantitation of 0.089 and 0.27 ppb, respectively, using a Cs-133 internal standard, a 286 x dilution factor, and drift correction. The average I-127 concentration in corals was 4.5 ppm. For I-129/I-127 measurement, we determined the average anthropogenic (post-1950) and natural (pre-1950) ratios of 20 x 10(-12) and 1.4 x 10(-12), respectively, in our coral samples. In addition, the average relative standard deviations were 11.5% and 23% for anthropogenic-and natural-age coral samples, respectively. Our method successfully measured I-129/I-127 in 1-4 g of corals with accuracy and precision comparable to the existing method, which required 10-30 g of corals.

  • 出版日期2017-9-21

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