Barium Isotopic Compositions of Geological Reference Materials

Abstract

The interest in variations of barium (Ba) stable isotope amount ratios in low and high temperature environments has increased over the past several years. Characterisa- tion of Ba isotope ratios of widely available reference materials is now required to validate analytical proce- dures and to allow comparison of data obtained by different laboratories. We present new Ba isotope amount ratio data for twelve geological reference materials with silicate (AGV-1, G-2, BHVO-1, QLO-1, BIR-1, JG-1a, JB- 1a, JR-1 and JA-1), carbonate (IAEA-CO-9) and sulfate matrices (IAEA-SO-5 and IAEA-SO-6) relative to NIST SRM 3104a. In addition, two artificially fractionated in-house reference materials BaBe12 and BaBe27 (d137/134Ba = -1.161 ± 0.049‰ and -0.616 ± 0.050‰, respectively) are used as quality control solutions for the negative d- range. Accuracy of our data was assessed by interlabo- ratory comparison between the University of Bern and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Data were measured by MC-ICP-MS (Bern) and TIMS (USGS) using two different double spikes for mass bias correction (130Ba–135Ba and 132Ba–136Ba, respectively). MC-ICP- MS measurements were further tested for isobaric and non-spectral matrix effects by a number of common matrix elements. The results are in excellent agreement and suggest data accuracy.