Periodic Table--Nickel

Nickel-59 is a long-lived cosmogenic radionuclide with a half-life of 80,000 years. ⁵⁹Ni has found many applications in isotope geology. ⁵⁹Ni has been used to date the terrestrial age of meteorites and to determine abundances of extraterrestrial dust in ice and sediment.

Nickel-60 is the daughter product of the extinct radionuclide ⁶⁰Fe (half-life = 1.5 Myr). Because the extinct radionuclide ⁶⁰Fe had such a long half-life, its persistence in solar-system materials at high enough concentrations may have generated observable variations in the isotopic composition of ⁶⁰Ni. Therefore, the abundance of ⁶⁰Ni present in extraterrestrial material may provide insight into the origin of the solar system and its early history. Shukolyukov and Lugmair (1993) found excess ⁶⁰Ni in meteorites, suggesting that ⁶⁰Fe was still alive at the time of differentiation. Isochron correlations between ⁶⁰Ni/⁵⁸Ni and Fe/Ni also confirm this conclusion.

Source of text: This review was assembled by Eric Caldwell, primarily from Dicken (1995) and Faure (1986).