Abstract
Standards for reporting C-14 age determinations are discussed. All dates should be related either directly or indirectly to the NBS oxalic acid standard. Corrections for isotopic fractionation are also desirable. For some materials, particularly marine shell, corrections for reservoir effect are necessary, but these should always be reported separately from the conventional radiocarbon age. The statistical uncertainty (plus or minus one standard deviation) expresses counting errors, inaccuracies in voltage, pressure, temperature, dilution, and should include errors in C-13 ratios. Errors can be significant when isotope ratios are estimated rather than measured directly. The error in the conventional C-14 half life is not included. The article includes tables indicating what data should be reported.
Keywords
Isotope dilutionStandard deviationOxalic acidMeasurement uncertaintyEnvironmental scienceIsotopeFractionationRadiocarbon datingDilutionSystematic errorStandard errorChemistryEnvironmental chemistryStatisticsChromatographyMathematicsGeologyMass spectrometryNuclear physicsThermodynamicsPhysics
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
The IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curve (0–55 cal kBP)
ABSTRACT Radiocarbon ( 14 C) ages cannot provide absolutely dated chronologies for archaeological or paleoenvironmental studies directly but must be converted to calendar age eq...
How Much Should We Trust Differences-In-Differences Estimates?
Most papers that employ Differences-in-Differences estimation (DD) use many years of data and focus on serially correlated outcomes but ignore that the resulting standard errors...
Global climate change and North American mammalian evolution
We compare refined data sets for Atlantic benthic foraminiferal oxygen isotope ratios and for North American mammalian diversity, faunal turnover, and body mass distributions. E...
Repeatability for Gaussian and non‐Gaussian data: a practical guide for biologists
Repeatability (more precisely the common measure of repeatability, the intra‐class correlation coefficient, ICC) is an important index for quantifying the accuracy of measuremen...
Random Allocation in Observational Data
Conventional observational epidemiology has an unenviable reputation for generating false-positive findings,1,2 or "scares," as others call them.3 In 1993, for example, the New ...
Publication Info
- Year
- 2003
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 18A-26A
- Citations
- 4919
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Citation Metrics
4919
OpenAlex
Cite This
Minze Stuiver,
Henry Polach
(2003).
Characterizing aquatic dissolved organic matter..
PubMed
, 37
(1)
, 18A-26A.