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Twenty-Five Years of Radiocarbon Dating Soils: Paradigm of Erring and Learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

H. W. Scharpenseel  and
Peter Becker-Heidmann
H. W. Scharpenseel
Affiliation:
Institute of Soil Science, Hamburg University, Allendeplatz 2, D-2000 Hamburg 13, Germany
Peter Becker-Heidmann
Affiliation:
Institute of Soil Science, Hamburg University, Allendeplatz 2, D-2000 Hamburg 13, Germany
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Abstract

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Soil organic matter sequesters close to three times the carbon existing totally in the living biomass and nearly the same for the total carbon in the atmosphere. Models, such as Jenkinson's or Parton's Century model, help to define soil organic matter fractions of different functions, based on residence time/14C age. Rejuvenation of soil carbon was felt to be the principal impediment to absolute soil dating, in addition to the ambiguity of the initiation point of soil formation and soil age. Recent studies, for example, of Becker-Heidmann (1989), indicate that a soil 14C age of >1000 yr cannot have >0.1% rejuvenation in the total soil organic matter compartments/fractions to be possible and sustainable. Always problematic in earlier observations were age vs. depth increases, in 14C profile curves showing an inflection of reduced age in the deepest samples, i.e., from the rim of the organic matter containing epipedon. We attribute this phenomenon, in mollic horizons, to earthworm casts in the terminal part of the escape tube. Becker-Heidmann (1989) has shown, in thin layer soil profile dating, a highly significant correlation between the highest 14C ages and the highest clay content. Thus, optimization of soil dating is, to a lesser degree, related to the applied extracting solvent system than to soil texture fractions. Such observations allow us to mitigate error ranges inherent in dating dynamic soil systems.

Type
II. Applied Isotope Geochemistry
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 34 , Issue 3: Proceedings of the 14th International Radiocarbon Conference , 1992 , pp. 541 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © The American Journal of Science 

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