Abstract The radiocarbon content of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC: CO 2(aq) , HCO 3 – , CO 3 2– ) and gaseous CO 2 can provide valuable information for the cycling and residence time of carbon in groundwaters, porewaters, hydrocarbon reservoirs, methane seeps, and hydrothermal systems. Fluids and gases from these systems often contain high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide (H 2 S) that interferes with critical steps of the analytical procedure, particularly the reduction of CO 2 to graphite. We developed and tested a simple and effective method to remove H 2 S from water and gas samples prior to graphitization by passing the gas through a silver nitrate solution in dilute nitric acid. The resulting cleaned CO 2 was sufficiently pure to be reduced to graphite by hydrogen on an iron catalyst. The mass of the process blank of this method is negligible (0.45 ± 0.10 µg C, with F 14 C of 0.30 ± 0.20) and almost identical to our process blanks without the H 2 S trap (0.43 ± 0.10 µg C, F 14 C = 0.30 ± 0.10). The method has been successfully applied to samples containing elevated H 2 S from multiple hydrothermal vent fluids.
Xu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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