Production rate calibration for cosmogenic 10Be in pyroxene by applying a rapid fusion method to 10Be-saturated samples from the Transantarctic Mountains, Antarctica.

Measurements of multiple cosmogenic nuclides in a single sample are valuable for various applications of cosmogenic nuclide exposure dating and allow for correcting exposure ages for surface weathering and erosion and establishing exposure-burial history. Here we provide advances in the measurement of cosmogenic ¹⁰Be in pyroxene and constraints on the production rate which provide new opportunities for measurements of multi-nuclide systems, such as ¹⁰Be/³He, in pyroxene-bearing samples. We extracted and measured cosmogenic ¹⁰Be in pyroxene from two sets of Ferrar Dolerite samples collected from the Transantarctic Mountains in Antarctica. One set of samples has ¹⁰Be concentrations close to saturation which allows for the production rate calibration of ¹⁰Be in pyroxene by assuming production-erosion equilibrium. The other set of samples, which has a more recent exposure history, is used to determine if a rapid fusion method can be successfully applied to samples with Holocene to Last-Glacial-Maximum exposure ages. From measured ¹⁰Be concentrations in the near-saturation sample set we find the production rate of ¹⁰Be in pyroxene to be 3.74 +/- 0.10 atoms g^-1 yr^-1 and is consistent with ¹⁰Be/³He paired nuclide ratios from samples assumed to have simple exposure. Given the high ¹⁰Be concentration measured in this sample set, a sample mass of ~0.5 g of pyroxene is sufficient for the extraction of cosmogenic ¹⁰Be from pyroxene using a rapid fusion method. However, for the set of samples having low ¹⁰Be concentrations, measured concentrations were higher than expected. We attribute spuriously high ¹⁰Be concentration to potential failure in removing all meteoric ¹⁰Be and/or a highly variable and poorly quantified measurement background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]