Controls on 10Be/9Be records in the oceans
Oceanic records of multiple isotope systems have been applied to investigate the interaction between climate and Earth surface processes. Understanding modern oceanic budgets and controls is essential for interpreting such isotope records.
Our focus here lies in the oceanic Be isotopes, which have been used as a tracer for continental erosion and weathering recently. Research on oceanic Be isotopes at ETH Zurich covers the following aspects: 1) constraining individual Be sources by river water and marine pore-water measurements, and 2) improving the mechanistic understanding of paleo-isotope records based on updated oceanic Be budgets.
a) A schematic plot for major sources and sinks of oceanic Be; b) mixing experiments using Amazon River water (two tributaries) and seawater (Suhrhoff et al., 2019), including the conservative mixing trend as the dashed lines; c) extraction of marine sediment pore-water using Rhizon samplers.
Student projects
- Suhrhoff, T.J. (2017). Does the Marine Beryllium Isotope Ratio Record Changes in Silicate Weathering?: Implications of Carbonate Weathering Fluxes, Estuarine Trapping Processes, and Sedimentary Fluxes. Master's project.
Selected publications
- Suhrhoff, T.J. et al. (2019) external pageGeochim. Cosmochim. Acta 265, 48-68.