A team of scientists from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, TUD Dresden University of Technology, and the Australian National University has made a groundbreaking discovery in the Central and Northern Pacific Ocean. They found an unexpected accumulation of beryllium-10, a rare radionuclide produced by cosmic rays, in samples taken from the ocean floor.
Beryllium-10 is used to date archaeological and geological samples, particularly through techniques like cosmogenic nuclide dating. The team’s findings suggest that this marker could serve as a global time marker for marine archives spanning millions of years, providing a new and independent way to measure time.
The discovery was made by lead author Dr. Dominik Koll and his colleagues, who analyzed the samples using various methods, including biostratigraphy, isotopic analysis, and magnetostratigraphy. They found that the beryllium-10 anomaly in the Pacific Ocean dates back to around 10 million years ago, during the Late Miocene epoch.
This breakthrough has significant implications for our understanding of Earth’s history and the movement of ocean currents. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.
Source: https://www.sci.news/othersciences/geoscience/cosmogenic-beryllium-anomaly-pacific-ocean-13657.html