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Isotopic Composition of Atmospheric Hydrogen and Methane

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Abstract

IN a recent communication, Bishop and Taylor1 express the opinion that the tritium concentration of free hydrogen in the atmosphere has been rising over the past ten years, with a doubling time of approximately 18 months. The authors suspect that artificial tritium was released into the atmosphere several years before the Castle test series in 1954, which is commonly assumed to have led to the first pronounced rise in the tritium concentration of terrestrial surface water. Bishop and Taylor's communication includes a diagram of the logarithms of all the experimentally determined tritium values in free atmospheric hydrogen plotted against time. The plot shows that the values follow a straight line that includes the first value obtained by Faltings and Harteck2 on atmospheric hydrogen collected in 1948.

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References

  1. Bishop, K. F., and Taylor, B. T., Nature, 185, 26 (1960).

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  2. Faltings, V., and Harteck, P., Z. Naturforsch., 5, a, 438 (1950).

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  3. Harteck, P., and Suess, H. E., Naturwiss., 86, 218 (1949).

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  5. Bishop, K. F., Delafield, H. J., Eggleton, A. E. G., Peabody, C. O., and Taylor, B. T., Paper No. TTS/79, I.A.E.A. Symp. on Detection and Use of Tritium in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vienna (1961).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California

    A. E. BAINBRIDGE & H. E. SUESS

  2. U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D.C.

    IRVING FRIEDMAN

Authors
  1. A. E. BAINBRIDGE
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  2. H. E. SUESS
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  3. IRVING FRIEDMAN
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BAINBRIDGE, A., SUESS, H. & FRIEDMAN, I. Isotopic Composition of Atmospheric Hydrogen and Methane. Nature 192, 648–649 (1961). https://doi.org/10.1038/192648a0

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