New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting — Abstracts

In the past 20 years the measurement of rare nuclides produced in minerals at the surface of the earth has evolved from being an analytical geochemistry innovation to the status of a routinely-applied method in geochronology and geomorphology. Unfortunately, understanding of the foundational systematics of cosmogenic nuclide production rates and variations with location and time have lagged far behind the analytical advances. The CRONUS-Earth Project has been established to remedy this deficiency. The NSF-funded project is headquartered at New Mexico Tech. It is highly interdisciplinary, with geologists, cosmochemists, experimental physicists, cosmic-ray physicists, and applied mathematicians working together in a coordinated program to establish benchmark models for cosmogenic-nuclide production and to optimally parameterize those models. The outcome will be a high degree of geochronological accuracy and intercomparability for a wide variety of cosmogenic nuclides, applied anywhere on earth.