Abstract
We applied sector-field ICP-MS to rapidly establish the chronology of recent lake sediments in Chenghai Lake, China via measurements of the activities of 239+240Pu, and the atom ratio 240Pu/239Pu. The Pu activity profile obtained with SF-ICP-MS was in agreement with a gama spectrometric 137Cs profile. Three peaks were observed for both 137Cs and Pu activities in the examined sediment core, the 240Pu/239Pu atom ratios indicated that these three peaks represents the fallouts from 1964 global fallout, the 1970s Chinese Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Chernobyl accident in 1986, respectively, with the global fallout as the major source of Pu.
