Cancelled Stable Isotopes

Stable isotopes can be thought of as "the DNA of inorganic materials". They inform us about where materials come from and how they formed.

Stable isotopes provide novel insights to chemical processes across a wide range of fields within the geosciences, including paleoclimate, agriculture, ecology, hydrology, petrology, oceanography, planetary science and paleontology.

This course provides the theoretical background for understanding stable isotope fractionation in natural systems, how isotopes are measured and examples of applications within bio- and geosciences, where isotope analyses are currently used. Stable isotope compositions are used in provenance studies for 'barcoding' inorganic materials, constraining global biogeochemical cycles and chemical reactions and pathways in nature. The course concerns mass-dependent isotope fractionation (e.g., ¹³C/¹²C and ¹⁸O/¹⁶O isotopes),  non-mass dependent isotope processes (e.g., ¹⁷O and ³³S) and nuclear volume effects (e.g. Tl and U isotopes), and clumped isotope molecular effects (e.g. ⁴⁷CO₂). It also introduces instrumentation for isotope analyses and measures for data quality. Applications of stable isotope systems will be selected following the students specific interests in order to investigate important biogeochemical, environmental, and geologic processes today and in the past. For example, we will explore some of the non-traditional isotope systems (e.g., Li, B, Si, Ca, Fe, Mo, U stable isotopes) and address these tools to scientific problems ranging from the microscopic to the planetary scale.