Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Volume 50, Issue 13, Pages 7066-7073Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b01108
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Funding
- US NSF PLR [0538416, 0856845, 0968391, 0909541, 1023672, 1023318, 1204176]
- Natural Environment Research Council [bas0100034] Funding Source: researchfish
- NERC [bas0100034] Funding Source: UKRI
- Office Of Internatl Science &Engineering
- Office Of The Director [0968391] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Office of Polar Programs (OPP)
- Directorate For Geosciences [1204176] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Atmospheric nuclear weapons testing (NWT) resulted in the injection of plutonium (Pu) into the atmosphere and subsequent global deposition. We present a new method for continuous semiquantitative measurement of Pu-239 in ice cores, which was used to develop annual records of fallout from NWT in ten ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The Pu-239 was measured directly using an inductively coupled plasma sector field mass spectrometer, thereby reducing analysis time and increasing depth-resolution with respect to previous methods. To validate this method, we compared our one year averaged results to published Pu-239 records and other records of NWT. The Pu-239 profiles from the Arctic ice cores reflected global trends in NWT and were in agreement with discrete Pu profiles from lower latitude ice cores. The Pu-239 measurements in the Antarctic ice cores tracked low latitude NWT, consistent with previously published discrete records from Antarctica. Advantages of the continuous Pu-239 measurement method are (1) reduced sample preparation and analysis time; (2) no requirement for additional ice samples for NWT fallout determinations; (3) measurements are exactly coregistered with all other chemical, elemental, isotopic, and gas measurements from the continuous analytical system; and (4) the long half-life means the Pu-239 record is stable through time.
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