Carbon-14: Absolute and Relative Concentration

Suppose we want to measure the carbon-14 concentration in a cubic meter of gas. If we can measure the rate at which the gas emits beta particles, we will know the number of carbon-14 decays occurring per second. Because 0.012% of carbon-14 atoms undergo beta decay every year, we can deduce the number of carbon-14 atoms in the gas from the decay rate. By some chemical procedure, we measure the amount of carbon in the gas, and so we can deduce the carbon-14 concentration.

To measure the rate at which the gas produces beta particles, we put the gas in a chamber. All around the chamber we arrange devices that detect beta particles. We will not be able to cover the entire surface area with beta detectors, but we can measure the fraction we cover. If we cover half the area, we can assume half the beta particles emerging from the gas will strike one of our detectors. The detectors may not detect every beta particle that strikes them. But we can perform experiments to measure their efficiency. We end up with a scaling factor by which we can multiply the number of beta particles we detect to obtain the number of beta particles that left the gas volume.

The beta particles have energy up to 156 keV, with a Fermi-Dirac distribution. The most energetic of them can penetrate 100 mm of air. But they are not certain to do so. The least energetic of them can penetrate only a few millimeters of gas. Only a small fraction of the beta particles emitted by carbon-14 decaying within our cubic meter of gas will ever make it to our detectors. But we can, with the help of the continuous slowing-down approximation, and the Fermi-Dirac distribution, estimate the fraction of beta particles that will emerge from the gas volume. And so we can obtain a scaling factor by which to multiply the number beta particles we detect to obtain the total number of beta particles emitted by the gas.

Having performed these calculations, we start to count beta particles. If the gas contains 300 ppmv of CO2 and 1.0 ppt of carbon-14, there will be of order 2.6×10¹¹ carbon-14 atoms in the gas. Of these, 3.1×10⁷ will decay each year, or 0.97 per second. Our chamber is 50% covered with detectors that are 50% efficient, and only 10% of our beta particles get out of the gas volume, so we expect to detect of order one beta decay every forty seconds.

Before we make our first measurement, we evacuate our chamber, to measure the background rate of beta particles. We find that our beta detectors are detecting one or two beta particles per second. These are due to radioactive isotopes in the chamber walls, cosmic ray showers, and electronic noise.

At this point, we realize that measuring carbon-14 in a gas is going to be hard. So we freeze the carbon dioxide out of our gas sample and put a pellet of solid CO2 into a much smaller chamber. We still have the same problems, but they are less severe. We can reduce our background beta-particle rate to one every ten seconds, while raising our carbon-14 beta rate to one per second. We will have to admit, however, that our measurement of carbon-14 concentration will be accurate to no better than ±20%. And indeed, the measurements of atmospheric carbon-14 concentration vary from 1.0 to 1.5 ppt.

But it is much easier to measure the relative concentration of carbon-14 in various samples of gas, water, or wood. We put one sample in our chamber and count beta particles, then another sample. If our first measurement is 20% too high, so will the second one, because the 20% error is a feature of the chamber, not the sample. The upshot of these practical considerations is that we can say that the deep oceans have carbon-14 concentration 80% of atmospheric, and be confident to ±2%, but we cannot say what the actual deep ocean concentration is to better than ±20%.

So far, we have assumed that the atmospheric concentration of carbon-14 is 1.0 ppt. In fact, it may be as high as 1.5 ppt. If it is 1.5 ppt, we have 980 kg of carbon-14 in our natural, equilibrium atmosphere, instead of the 650 kg we calculated assuming 1.0 ppt. This 980 kg is still negligible compared to the 62,500 kg of carbon-14 in the reservoir. And it is the relative concentration in the deep ocean that dictates the values of the mass exchange rate and reservoir size in our carbon cycle model, not the absolute concentration.

Thus, it may be that the atmosphere contains 1.5 ppt of carbon-14, not 1.0 ppt, but this has no significant effect upon our conclusions. We will continue to assume that our natural, equilibrium atmosphere contains 1.0 ppt, and quote concentrations in other potential reservoirs of carbon-14 as a fraction of the atmospheric concentration, just as the authors do in Arnold et a., where they use "relative specific activity corrected for fractionation".