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Lacustrine Environments (14C)

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Encyclopedia of Scientific Dating Methods

Synonyms

Radiocarbon

Definition

Lacustrine. Having to do with any part of a lake system.

Introduction

Lakes are extremely powerful archives of climate and environmental information, because they record changes in the landscape around them, and the records they preserve are thus directly relevant to the activities and environments of human societies (e.g., Adams et al. 2008). Lakes commonly have very high sedimentation rates (5–20 years/cm) and preserve biological, geochemical, and sedimentary proxies and therefore may contain highly detailed records of past change. However, lakes are also dynamic sedimentary systems, and steady, continuous sedimentation may be disrupted by floods, lake-level changes, slope failures, and seismic shaking (e.g., Smith et al. 2013). Along with sedimentary fabric, radiometric dating is the best way to identify missing or repeated sections (Grimm 2011) and to identify and quantify changes in sedimentation rate.

Radiocarbon dating is the technique most often...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Ave, L-397, Livermore, CA, 94551-0808, USA

    Susan Zimmerman

  2. LacCore, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota, 7000 East Ave, L-397, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Amy Myrbo

Authors
  1. Susan Zimmerman
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  2. Amy Myrbo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Susan Zimmerman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    W. Jack Rink

  2. Department of Medical Physics and Applied Radiation Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Jeroen Thompson

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Zimmerman, S., Myrbo, A. (2014). Lacustrine Environments (14C). In: Rink, W., Thompson, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Scientific Dating Methods. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6326-5_160-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6326-5_160-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-6326-5

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