Nature Does the Averaging—In-Situ Produced ¹⁰Be, ²¹Ne, and ²⁶Al in a Very Young River Terrace

Abstract

The concentrations of long-lived in-situ produced cosmogenic nuclides (10Be, 21Ne, 26Al) in quartz obtained from a very recent (~200 a; based on 14C data on organic material) terrace of the Swakop River in Namibia are nearly constant throughout a 322 cm-long depth profile. These findings corroborate earlier hypotheses postulating a homogeneous distribution of these nuclides in freshly deposited river terrace sediments. An averaged nuclide concentration is a crucial and generally assumed prerequisite for the determination of numerical ages of old sediments.

Keywords

• cosmogenic nuclides
• accelerator mass spectrometry
• dating
• river sediments