CAUM: A software for calculating and assessing chemical ages of uranium minerals

Abstract

It has been shown that the age of minerals in which U ± Th are a major (e.g., uraninite, pitchblende and thorite) or minor (e.g., monazite, xenotime) component can be calculated from the concentrations of U ± Th and Pb rather than their isotopes, and such ages are referred to as chemical ages. Although equations for calculating the chemical ages have been well established and various computation programs have been reported, there is a lack of software that can not only calculate the chemical ages of individual analytical points but also provide an evaluation of the errors of individual ages as well as the whole dataset. In this paper, we develop a software for calculating and assessing the chemical ages of uranium minerals (CAUM), an open-source Python-based program with a friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI). Electron probe microanalysis (EPMA) data of uranium minerals are first imported from Excel files and used to calculate the chemical ages and associated errors of individual analytical points. The age data are then visualized to aid evaluating if the dataset comprises one or multiple populations and whether or not there are meaningful correlations between the chemical ages and impurities. Actions can then be taken to evaluate the errors within individual populations and the significance of the correlations. The use of the software is demonstrated with examples from published data.

Keywords

Chemical ages / Uranium minerals / EPMA / U-Th-Pb geochronology / Software / Python

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