Determination of chemical weathering rates from U series nuclides in soils and weathering profiles: Principles, applications and limitations

The development of U-series nuclides for investigating weathering processes has been significantly stimulated by the analytical improvement made over the last decades in measuring the U-238 series with intermediate half-lives (i.e., U-234-Th-230-Ra-226). It is proposed in this paper to present principles and methods that are now being developed to determine weathering rates from the study of U-series nuclides in soils and weathering profiles. Mathematical approaches, developed to calculate such rates, are based on some implicit assumptions that are also presented and must be kept in mind if one wants to correctly interpret the obtained ages. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.