News

A new research paper has just been published in Limnology and Oceanography: Methods from the CERC.OCEAN group, spearheaded by postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Sally Walker. Dr. Walker and her colleagues (which includes a number of CERC.OCEAN students and staff) investigated the comparability of oxygen isotope measurements determined using two different techniques, isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) and cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS), a new, more cost-effective, method. This is the first paper to investigate the inter-comparability of measurements made using these two techniques on samples with a range of salinities (0, 29.4, and 34.6). In this study, four independent labs, two using IRMS and two using CRDS, found that CRDS measurements of seawater can be equivalent to high-quality measurements made by IRMS.  

The full-text article can be accessed here.

Walker, S. A., Azetsu-Scott, K., Normandeau, C., Kelley, D. E., Friedrich, R., Newton, R., Schlosser, P., McKay, J. L., Abdi, W., Kerrigan, E., Craig, S. E. and Wallace, D. W. R. (2015), Oxygen isotope measurements of seawater ( H2¹⁸O/ H2¹⁶O): A comparison of cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS) and isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS). Limnology and Oceanography: Methods. doi: 10.1002/lom3.10067