Several groups at IUP have contributed to a new paper, which presents the in-house developments of a method for precise fluid inclusion stable isotope analysis using cavity-ring down laser spectroscopy operated with a continuously water-vapour purged extraction line. This method originally invented at the environmental physics institute in Bern has been implemented at IUP by Therese Weißbach in her PhD research, under the supervision of Tobias Kluge (now at KIT), the former head of the HGSFP junior research group Physics of Isotopologues at IUP.
Improvements and first applications of this method are now presented in the new paper published in the journal "Chemical Geology". In addition to technical results regarding the precision and accuracy of the analytical technique, the paper finds that stable isotopes in fluid inclusions of three different modern to late Holocene speleothems from caves in northwest Germany follow the the meteoric water line and correspond to the local drip water. It further demonstrates that such data from a Romanian stalagmite can be used to reconstruct the 20th century warming.
Reference:
Weissbach, T., T. Kluge, S. Affolter, M. C. Leuenberger, H. Vonhof, D. F. C. Riechelmann, J. Fohlmeister, M.-C. Juhl, B. Hemmer, Y. Wu, S. F. Warken, M. Schmidt, N. Frank, and W. Aeschbach, 2023. Constraints for precise and accurate fluid inclusion stable isotope analysis using water-vapour saturated CRDS techniques. Chem. Geol. 617: 121268, doi:10.1016/j.chemgeo.2022.121268
Picture: Section of the stalagmite Stam-4 from Closani Cave (Romania), which was analysed in the paper.