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Boron Stable Isotopes

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Encyclopedia of Geochemistry

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series ((EESS))

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Boron, a group 13 metalloid, has two natural occurring stable isotopes, 11B (11.00930536[45]) and 10B (10.01293695[41]), with relative abundances of 0.199(7) and 0.801(7), respectively, and hence occurs approximately in a 4:1 ratio (source of data: National Institute of Standards and Technology, http://www.nist.gov/pml/data/comp.cfm). Numerous radioisotopes of boron also occur with masses from 7B to 17B, but their half-lives are all <1 s. As with other stable isotopic systems, natural isotope variation is described using delta notation, i.e., the per mil variation from the 11B/10B ratio of the synthetic boric acid international reference material NIST SRM-951 (atom%: 11B = 80.173 ± 0.013; 10B = 19.827 ± 0.013; Catanzaro et al. 1970). This can be described by the following equation:

$$ {\delta}^{11}B=\left(\frac{{}^{11}B/{}^{10}B_{\mathrm{sample}}}{{}^{11}B/{}^{10}B_{\mathrm{reference}}}-1\right)\times {10}^3 $$
(1)

In natural systems, boron is almost exclusively found bound...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Gavin L. Foster

  2. Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon, LGL-TPE, CNRS UMR 5276, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and Institut Universitaire de France, Lyon, France

    Christophe Lécuyer

  3. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Wood Hole, MA, USA

    Horst R. Marschall

  4. Institut für Geowissenschaften, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Horst R. Marschall

Authors
  1. Gavin L. Foster
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  2. Christophe Lécuyer
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  3. Horst R. Marschall
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Gavin L. Foster , Christophe Lécuyer or Horst R. Marschall .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    William M. White

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Foster, G.L., Lécuyer, C., Marschall, H.R. (2018). Boron Stable Isotopes. In: White, W.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geochemistry. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39312-4_238

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