AMS Radiocarbon Dating of Ice: Validity of the Technique and the Problem of Cosmogenic In-Situ Production in Polar Ice Cores

In the “sublimation technique,” carbon dioxide entrapped in ice is recovered by sublimation, converted to graphite and ratio of 14C/13C in the CO2 determined by AMS measurements. We describe here several experiments performed to check the validity of such measurements and to study the effect of cosmogenically produced in-situ14C on the measurements.