Abstract
Lacustrine, riverine, and spring carbonates are archives of terrestrial
climate change and are extensively used to study paleoenvironments.
Clumped isotope thermometry has been applied to freshwater carbonates to
reconstruct temperatures, however, limited work has been done to
evaluate comparative relationships between clumped isotopes and
temperature in different types of modern freshwater carbonates.
Therefore, in this study, we assemble an extensive calibration dataset
with 135 samples of modern lacustrine, fluvial, and spring carbonates
from 96 sites and constrain the relationship between independent
observations of water temperature and the clumped isotopic composition
of carbonates (denoted by Δ47). We restandardize and synthesize
published data and report 159 new measurements of 25 samples. We derive
a composite freshwater calibration and also evaluate differences in the
Δ47-temperature dependence for different types of materials to examine
whether material-specific calibrations may be justified. When material
type is considered, there is a convergence of slopes between biological
carbonates (freshwater gastropods and bivalves), micrite,
biologically-mediated carbonates (microbialites and tufas), travertines,
and other recently published syntheses, but statistically significant
differences in intercepts between some materials, possibly due to
seasonal biases, kinetic isotope effects, and/or varying degrees of
biological influence. Δ47-based reconstructions of water δ18O generally
yield values within 2‰ of measured water δ18O when using a
material-specific calibration. We explore the implications of applying
these new calibrations in reconstructing temperature in three case
studies.