David Dettman

David Dettman is the director of the Environmental Isotope Laboratory in the Geosciences Department. This is a service lab for the University community and for clients worldwide that provides stable isotope measurements (and tritium) for a wide variety of projects in hydrology, ecology, geology, climate studies and many other fields. Among his recent research project are studies of the water balance, transport and storage in saguaro cactus, how stable isotope cycles in land snail shells can be used to trace the aridity of the Asian winter monsoon in the Pleistocene, and how shells of freshwater mussels can be used to build a history of nutrients and eutrophication in river systems. He is also actively involved in a project developing laser absorption technology for the measurement of clumped isotopes in ancient carbonates as a geothermometer.