Precise determination of Sr/Ca by laser ablation ICP-MS compared to ICP-AES and application to multi-century temperate corals

Copyright © 2014 by The Geochemical Society of Japan. der taken for oxygen isotope analysis. Solution-based analytical methods are, however, destructive and require a large amount of sample and complex chemical preparation prior to analysis. These techniques include thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) (Beck et al., 1992; Alibert and McCulloch, 1997) and high-resolution ICPMS (Felis et al., 2009). Coral analyses using in-situ microbeam techniques such as secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) have given insights into biomineralization processes (Hart and Cohen et al., 1996; Allison and Finch, 2004). LA-ICP-MS allows a rapid measurement of multiple elemental ratios in coral skeleton at a much larger spatial scale than SIMS and is better suited to monthly-resolved reconstructions of past SST and other environmental parameters (Sinclair et al., 1998; Sinclair, 2005; Fallon et al., 1999, 2003). This technique has been previously used for a coral from the western Pacific Warm Pool (Alibert and Kinsley, 2008). Although the Sr/Ca record was carefully replicated along multiple tracks, the small SST annual range in the equatorial region makes the application of the Sr/Ca thermometer challenging. Temperate corals are better suited to allow the refinement of analytical protocols and assess the longPrecise determination of Sr/Ca by laser ablation ICP-MS compared to ICP-AES and application to multi-century temperate corals