IRMS Carbonates

The Paléocéan team has a technical platform equipped with a microMill and 3 IRMS mass spectrometers dedicated to the isotopic measurements of carbon and oxygen (Isoprime, Isoprime 100 and PrecisION, Elementar).

The microMill can be used to sample very small quantities of material from macroscopic samples (e.g., corals, bivalves) in order to reconstruct in detail, the environmental variations recorded during their growth by carrying out isotopic measurements.

IRMS is dedicated to the analysis of ¹³C/¹²C and ¹⁸O/¹⁶O isotopes in small samples of biogenic carbonates (e.g., corals, bivalves, otoliths, and microfossils such as foraminifera, coccolites or ostracodes) and inorganic carbonates (e.g. marble, sediments or stalagmites).

Accuracies are of the order of 0.08 and 0.05 ‰, for oxygen and carbon, respectively. The quantity of material required for one measurement is of the order of 15-200 micrograms.

These measurements make it possible to finely reconstruct the environmental variations recorded during the growth of organisms and to understand the mechanisms of past climate variability in their oceanic components (the last few million years) and their impact on global climatology.