Global radiocarbon budget closure: prospects and carbon cycle implications

A one-day workshop on the use of radiocarbon as a carbon cycle tracer, and will primarily be of interest to those actively working on late Pleistocene carbon cycle dynamics. The workshop will focus on the current difficulties for ‘balancing’ the radiocarbon budget over the last ~40 kyr and their implications for our understanding of the radiocarbon/carbon cycles, and for our use of radiocarbon as a dating tool.

This workshop aims to bring together colleagues who are actively engaged in studying the global radiocarbon cycle using both proxy reconstructions (e.g. ice core, speleothem, marine/lacustrine sediments) and numerical models with a view to understanding past carbon cycle change. A central goal of the workshop will be to discuss current and future prospects for combining data and models to obtain closure of the global radiocarbon budget over the last ~40ka in order to provide new insights regarding the respective carbon cycle impacts of four key drivers: 1) radiocarbon production; 2) air-sea gas exchange; 3) ocean dynamics (and biogeochemistry); and 4) 'solid Earth' carbon sources/sinks. The workshop will address these four key topics over one day of presentations, posters, and open discussion, with the aim of producing a summary paper and spawning new international collaborations to address emerging challenges. 

Cost: None

Participant activities: poster presentations and rapid oral summaries of these, plus a limited number of invited talks.

Participation: Email Sophie Hines (shines@whoi.edu) or Luke Skinner (lcs32@cam.ac.uk) by May 23rd, including a short abstract (<250 words) describing work relevant to the workshop goals that you would be interested in presenting.