Abstract
Cosmogenic 14C was first measured in the 1940s using the “low level decay counting” techniques outlined in Sect. 15.2, and was soon being used for “carbon dating” (Chap. 23). This was before Scott Forbush discovered the 11-year variation in the galactic cosmic radiation (Sect. 7.2), and it was assumed that the production rate of the cosmogenic radionuclides in the atmosphere was independent of time. In 1957 however, following Forbush’s discovery, Bernard Peters and Devendra Lal (1962) predicted that the 14C production rate would vary with time. In the same year Walter Elsasser, a “solid earth” geophysicist, and two cosmic ray physicists, Ed Ney and John Winckler, predicted that the 14C concentration would be affected by the changing strength of the geomagnetic field. Soon after, de Vries obtained experimental evidence that the 14C production rate had been higher in ~1700ad than in the nineteenth century. Several years later Hans Suess demonstrated that there had been several variations of the 14C production rate over time, and these became known as the “Suess wiggles” (Suess 1970).
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Beer, J., McCracken, K., von Steiger, R. (2012). Solar Physics. In: Cosmogenic Radionuclides. Physics of Earth and Space Environments. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14651-0_17
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