Center for Isotope Research

The Center for Isotope Research (Centrum voor IsotopenOnderzoek, or short: CIO), is an interdisciplinary research institute within the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (FWN) of the University of Groningen. The center is specialized in making highly accurate measurements of (the variations in) the natural abundances of rare isotopes. To this end it has at its disposition a wide range of modern instrumentation (mass spectrometers, including a 2,5 MV accelerator mass spectrometer for C-14, as well as laser-based spectrometers), and carries out research that aims to improve existing techniques or develop new measurement methods. Within the CIO these analytical tools are predominantly applied in two fields of research:

• Research on the Global Carbon Cycle. The isotopes of the atmospheric greenhouse gas CO2 offer the possibility (together with concentration measurements of CO2 and oxygen) to follow the natural cycle of carbon on Earth and the anthropogenic (human) influences on this cycle. Much of this work is being financed by the EC in the frame work of the Kyoto agreement on the reduction of CO2 emissions.
• Paleaoclimatology. Nature has "archived" the history of Earth's past climate in a number of ways. The two archives that the CIO is actively studying are the Greenland and Antartica ice caps (a hundreds of thousand years old precipitation archive, in which the isotopes of water contain the information on the previous climate), and peat bogs from Europe and elsewhere (in which the plant debris provide information on the past climate, and its age is determined with the so-called C-14 method).

For more general information about these topics, click here (in Dutch).

Besides these two core activities isotope research is being employed in a variety of scientific fields, like archeology (dating), behavioral biology (energy expenditure of a subject under a range of environmental conditions), soil science (fertilizer use, soil depletion), hydrology (Dutch water management, drinking-water quality control), and oceanography (gulf streams, carbon cycle).