Accelerator mass spectrometry at Arizona: geochronology of the climate record and connections with the ocean

There are many diverse uses of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). Carbon-14 studies at our laboratory include much research related to paleoclimate, both with 14C as a tracer of past changes in environmental conditions as observed in corals, marine sediments and many terrestrial records. Terrestrial records such as forest fires can also show the influence of oceanic oscillations, whether they are short-term such as ENSO, or on the millennial time scale. In tracer applications, we have developed the use of 129I as well as 14C as tracers for nuclear pollution studies around radioactive waste dump sites, in collaboration with IAEA. We discuss some applications carried out in Tucson for several of these fields and hope to give some idea of the breadth of these studies.