Beryllium 10 on Titan? Options

[ngunn]

Like Earth, Titan is a world with many active processes operating, no doubt, over a wide range of timescales. In such an environment anything that can act as an absolute time marker in the landscape has the potential to yield a rich store of information. In an eye-opening paper* now a decade old Lorenz et. al. lay out this potential in respect of radiocarbon. They point out that not only will C14 be produced by the action of cosmic rays on Titan’s atmosphere but Titan has, in the formation of solid haze particles, a mechanism for removing it from the air and depositing it on the surface in solid or liquid form. Indeed Titan is probably the only place in the Solar System other than Earth where such a mechanism operates and where, as a consequence, there is the potential to use radiocarbon to track and date active processes in the landscape. The timescale involved is from centuries to a few tens of millennia, commensurate with the half-life of C14.

Well, there is another radioactive species produced by the action of cosmic rays on atmospheric nitrogen, namely beryllium 10. It has a much longer half-life, around 1.3 million years, which could make it the perfect complement to C14 by taking over the role of landscape marker for timescales in the range 10^5 t 10^7 yr. On Earth it is used as a tool for studying palaeoclimate. My (inexpert) searches have not turned up any references to Be10 on Titan so I thought I’d post my questions here. I’ve read enough to be sure that Be10 must form in Titan’s atmosphere, just like C14, so my questions are:

1/ Are there papers out there that I haven’t found where this is mentioned or discussed?

2/ If not, has anybody heard it raised informally, at a conference or whatever?

3/ What would likely happen to the Be 10 once formed? How would it react chemically? Would it be incorporated into haze particles or other precipitation and thereby end up in lakes and sediments?

* http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j...VCg&cad=rja

[Juramike]

Mind you, I've only ever known one person test that!

I've heard it said that nobody knows what Nickle tetracarbonyl smells like.

[PFK]

I've heard it said that nobody knows what Nickle tetracarbonyl smells like.

Ah yes, even when we did a fair bit of carbonyl work many moons ago I gave that one a miss
Dennis Evans, inventor of the Evans Balance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evans_balance) back in my time at IC was the only person I knew who confirmed the beryllium taste. But then Dennis was Old School; for example during an UG tutorial he illustrated the toxicity level of KCN by dipping his finger in a pot of it and showing that as you need 0.25g to kill yourself, you can happily taste a small amount. Needless to say non of us took him up on the offer; I did however avail myself of his demonstration of how to "gargle" liquid nitrogen (you keep it moving!) though I baulked at reproducing his party piece of doing it with liquid oxygen and then blowing out through a cigarette! While I was postdoc there he was admonished for smoking while demonstrating in the teaching lab; his response was to demonstrate how to stub your cig out in ether (you just have to be quick!). Around the same time I did have a Be encounter when breaking up the tedium between reactions by organising a game of football in the corridor (as you do). As goalposts we used two big boxes of materials from an old store that were being disposed of. After rattling the post a few times it occurred to me I'd better just check what was in the boxes just in case we broke them; finding two 100g jars of beryllium sulfate put a stop to the game pretty quickly
Health and Safety aint no fun