Modified method of separation and purification of U, Th in coral sample with UTEVA resin

Corals are one of the carriers for recording information about changes in the marine environment. For ex-ample, determining U/Ca to reconstruction of sea water temperature or measure the Th/U isotopic ratio for dating to reconstruction sea level etc. However, measuring the U and Th contents and isotopic ratio of corals is a prerequisite for extracting the recorded marine environmental change information, the difficulty lies in the separation of Ca mat-rix and enrichment and purification of trace U and Th. Based on this, this study modified the pretreatment method of separation and purification U and Th with single column stage of UTEVA resin, and then combined with high resolution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry to determine U and Th contents of corals. The results demonstrate that the HNO₃ medium concentration decrease from 3 mol/L to 2 mol/L will not affect the absorption efficiency of U and Th; 2 mL Milli-Q water can completely elute U, which significantly reduces the procedure blank value of the entire process of U; the improved method is used to determine the U and Th contents of three Hainan littoral corals (n=6, 1σ): U are (3.46±0.02)μg/g, (2.67±0.05)μg/g, (2.15±0.07)μg/g, respectively, Th are (10.12±0.24)ng/g, (4.82±0.10)ng/g, (5.65±0.12)ng/g, respectively; and the determination accuracy is below 3.3%, recovery rate of standard addition of U, Th are 97.9%–100.9%, 97.3%–99.7%, respectively. The method has high accuracy and good precision. This study provides a more accurate, convenient and rapid experimental method for the analysis of U and Th content and isotopic ratio in corals and other carbonate samples.