Tiree Passage, Inner Hebrides, West Scotland

Stable isotopes in biota

Mass spectrometers

This data set comprises stable oxygen (18O) and carbon (13C) isotope data obtained from live or fossilised samples of the bivalve Glycymeris glycymeris as part of the Climate of the LAst Millennium (CLAM) project. The bivalves were collected from the Tiree Passage (56 37.75N, 6 24.00W) at depths between 25 and 55 m, either by mechanical dredge, deployed by the RV Prince Madog in 2006, or manually, by scuba divers of the UK Natural Environment Research Council Facility for Scientific Diving (NFSD) between 2011 and 2014. The ages of the shells were independently validated by ‘range finder’ accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon (14C) dating. The isotopic composition of all samples was measured using a Kiel IV carbonate preparation device attached to a Thermo Finnigan Mat 253 mass spectrometer. The shell samples were analysed alongside an internal standard made of Carrara marble (no less than six standards per 40 shell samples) and calibrated against international standard NBS-19, expressed relative to the Vienna Pee Dee Belemnite (VPDB). The samples were analysed using 100% orthophosphoric acid at 70 ° C for 300 seconds and no specific aragonite phosphoric acid fractionation factor was applied. The external precision for both 13C and 18O isotopes, based on the replicate analyses of the internal standard Carrara marble, over the course of the analyses was 0.05 permil. The data are presented as annual values, from 1797 to 2010 for the carbon isotope data and from 1799 to 2010 for the oxygen isotope data. This data set was created under the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant NE/N001176/1 held at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University.

Reynolds,D.J.,Hall,I.R.,Slater,S.,Scourse,J.D.,Halloran,P.R.&Sayer,M.D.J. (2017) Reconstructing past seasonal to multi-centennial scale variability in the NE Atlantic Ocean using the long-lived marine bivalve mollusc, Paleocanography; Reynolds D.J., Hall I.R., Slater S.M. (2019) An integrated carbon and oxygen isotope approach to reconstructing past environmental variability in the northeast Atlantic Ocean., Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

British Oceanographic Data Centre
Joseph Proudman Building 6 Brownlow Street
Liverpool
Merseyside
L3 5DA
United Kingdom