“AgeFinder”: A Mac OS X computer program to evaluate electron microprobe data of monazite for chemical age dating

A computer program is presented that can be used to obtain ages of geological significance from compositional data of monazite. The program calculates dates and their errors from U, Th and Pb concentration data obtained with the electron microprobe. The results can be displayed in isochron and gauss curve diagrams. Subsets of the data can be selected and interactively evaluated with a user friendly graphical interface. For each selected data set a cumulative date, an isochron date, their errors and the mean squared weighted deviates (MSWD) are calculated and a chi-square test is performed. The diagrams can be saved to pdf and all calculated data can be exported to a text file or saved in native format. The software runs on any Apple Macintosh with Mac OS X Tiger or later versions.