Seashells: exquisite thermometers

Abstract

Seashells are highly prized for their exquisite architecture, colours and in some cases, their delicious content. Did you know that the chemistry of those shells can tell us the temperature of the sea? If we analyse how common it is for oxygen and carbon atoms of different masses to come together within an oyster or mussel shell, we can work out the temperature at which those shells were formed, and from that we can infer the sea water temperature. This is possible thanks to the cutting-edge technique of clumped isotopes, one of the most recent international celebrities in Earth Sciences. The discovery many decades ago of the property of some heavy atoms to bond with each other more or less frequently, depending on the temperature, and the recent advances which have made it possible to measure such a property, have opened up new possibilities for diverse scientific fields.

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