![]() Salts like halite, carbonate or silicate form from the ocean and are mixed together with other minerals in rocks. “We can measure the isotopic concentration of, for example, halite, or rock salt, through geologic time and the isotopic composition will be a balance between inputs from continental weathering and seafloor alteration.” “The idea is we can measure the potassium isotopic concentration of seawater through time,” says Hu. When asked by peers how the team was able to achieve such high precision, he replies, “They need a student like Hu to do that.”įuture work could use potassium isotopes to understand how the atmosphere, ocean and seafloor have changed with the movement of continents throughout Earth’s history. “Hu’s paper in 2018 was the first study of high-precision potassium isotopes, and since then she’s been working very hard in the lab to refine this method and apply it to solve major geological processes.”įang-Zhen Teng Hu with a photo of oceanic crust. “We were aiming to achieve an unprecedented level of precision, which required many weeks of trying and tuning,” Teng said. ![]() UW’s Non-Traditional Isotope Laboratory is one of only a handful of labs in the world with the equipment to carry out this work, and developing the methods to conduct potassium isotope analysis at such high level of detail was no small feat. ![]() “This work is the first thing our community needed to do in order to use potassium isotopes as a tracer, and potassium is also one of the most important elements in major reservoirs we have to characterize,” Teng said. Co-corresponding author Fang-Zhen Teng, a UW professor in earth and space sciences, describes the long-standing inability to measure potassium isotopes with fine precision as “a first-order problem.” Prior to Hu’s work, which has spanned multiple years and publications, researchers lacked the analytical precision to differentiate potassium isotope variations. This is something that’s been difficult for scientists to do in the past. By piecing these complicated processes together, scientists can look at and classify the specific potassium isotope signature in samples of oceanic crust and subducting sediments from major subduction zones, helping them tell the story of geologic and atmospheric change through time more precisely. When substances change states, such as transitioning from a liquid to a solid, the ratio of light and heavy isotopes of potassium changes because lighter isotopes have faster reaction rates. The stable potassium isotopes - potassium that differs in the number of neutrons - can be either light or heavy and accordingly break down differently. Over time, plate tectonics alter seafloor crusts and sediments at subduction zones. Being able to precisely trace potassium is important because it can tell us the rate at which minerals move from land via runoff into the ocean, where the minerals become incorporated into crust and sediment on the seafloor.
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