The paper led by Mariah Carbone, “Atmospheric radiocarbon for the period 1910-2021 recorded by annual plants” has just been published in the journal Radiocarbon. The paper draws on archived samples from NAU’s Deaver Herbarium to reconstruct a smoothed record representative of the Colorado Plateau for “bomb spike” 14C dating of recent terrestrial organic matter. The paper concludes that “archived annual plants serve as faithful scribes: samples from herbaria around the Earth may be an under-utilized resource to improve understanding of the modern carbon cycle.” Mariah was interviewed by KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny after the paper came out.
