Collecting carbonate nodules for analysis

Graduate student John Finarelli is collecting nodule of calcium carbonate to be shipped to the Smithsonian's isotope analysis lab. Carbon has two stable isotopes, Carbon-12 and Carbon-13. Different plants leave different proportions of these in the soil, so by analyzing the proportion of ¹²C to ¹³C, we can determine what the vegetation was like when this landscape was inhabited by the early humans.

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