Link to USGS home page

Resources on Isotopes

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).

References
Dicken, A.P. (1995). Radiogenic Isotope Geology. Cambridge University Press, New York, 452 p.
Faure, G. (1986). Principles of Isotope Geology, Second Edition. John Wiley and Sons, New York. 589 p.
Shukolyukov, A. and Lugmair, G.W. (1993). "Live iron-60 in the early solar system." Science, 259: 1138-1142.
Related Links
Periodic Table
Fundamentals of Stable Isotope Geochemistry
General References
Isotope Publications
Please contact Carol Kendall (ckendall@usgs.gov) for questions and comments regarding this page.
This page was last changed in January 2004.
To the USGS Home Page
To the Water Resources Information Home Page