NSRL works in collaboration with AMS measurement facilities to provide state-of-the-art radiocarbon preparation and measurement services to the local University and Federal research communities and pursues in-house research on applications of ¹⁴C dating to climate change studies, calibration of the ¹⁴C timescale, and the use of ¹⁴C as a geochemical and geophysical tracer in the Earth system.

NSRL maintains an active collaboration with the NOAA’s Boulder-based Global Monitoring Division (GMD) aimed at development and use of ultra-precise ¹⁴C measurement in CO₂ as a quantitative tracer for recently-added, fossil fuel derived CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Recent media stories

• Lawns and landscaping complicate taking the measure of Los Angeles Basin’s carbon footprint (2020)
• Tracking fossil fuel emissions with carbon-14 (2020)
• One fifth of Los Angeles’s CO₂ rises from lawns and golf courses (2018)
• Ozone treaty taking a bite out of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (2017)
• The climate lab that sits empty (2017)
• Humans, not climate change, wiped out Australian megafauna (2017)