Sentences with phrase «isotope ratios provide»

Not exact matches

The new Schmidt grant will allow the Scripps team to chip away at a years - long backlog of air samples to measure changes in the ratio of carbon isotopes, which provides information about manmade sources of CO2.

The team used records of oxygen isotope ratios (which provide a record of ancient water temperature) from microscopic plankton fossils recovered from the Mediterranean Sea, spanning the last 5.3 million years.

The isotope composition of water vapor, i.e. the ratio of light and heavy water molecules, provides insight into underlying mechanisms.

The researchers suspected that the ants provide D. major with nutrients in return for shelter To test this idea, they looked at the ratios of different isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the plant's tissues.

More recently, researchers have shown that the ratio of isotopes in feathers can provide a rough guide to where a bird has been feeding, because the feather ratios mirror those of food sources.

The ratio of different strontium isotopes varies from place to place, providing clues to where an animal lived.

The ratio between quantities of different isotopes provides the data for an equation that calculates the age.

The approach, called tunable infrared laser direct absorption spectroscopy, detects the ratio of methane isotopes, which can provide a «fingerprint» to differentiate between two common origins: microbial, in which microorganisms, typically living in wetlands or the guts of animals, produce methane as a metabolic byproduct; or thermogenic, in which organic matter, buried deep within the Earth, decays to methane at high temperatures.

The ratio of the isotopes of strontium - 87 and strontium - 86 varies widely in different soils and rocks, and ingested strontium collects in the teeth of children, providing a lifelong signature of where a person grew up.

The formation, isotope ratio and size of the clumps — less than 50 atoms in diameter — become, in effect, a clock, says Valley, and verify that existing geochronology methods provide reliable and accurate estimates of the sample's age.

The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation.

The prevalences and isotope ratios of the noble, or inert, gases, such as neon, argon, krypton and xenon, provide a valuable tracer of ancient processes, because they are chemically nonreactive and so do not change much over time.

Stable isotope ratios in atmospheric methane and carbon dioxide provide a window on the sources as well.