So we select the simplest crystals with the simplest crystallization history and then we take them to

a chemistry lab that when all the air and all the water and acids are filtered and distilled so that it’s
clean of lead the whole environment of the lab is clean and then we wash the crystals and distilled
acids and we place them in Teflon capsules with hydrofluoric acid and we put that in an oven at 200
centigrade for three days in the oven in this pressurized Teflon capsule in hydrofluoric acid. The
entire crystal dissolves and when we take it out and open the capsule we have a clear solution no
crystals left, that clear solution contains all the elements, that were in the mineral zircon which are
silicon zirconium rare earth elements and uranium and lead. We spend a day usually doing six
samples at a time passing them through a procedure called ion exchange chemistry. It´s a bit like
the chemical filters that you would get in a Brita walter filter for example We passed this clear
solution through this ion exchange column filled with a resin and by changing the composition of the
water or the acid through that we pass through the resin after we put the sample in we can wash
certain elements away out of the column while the resin chemically bonds to other elements and
holds them in the column so by a simple design of the chemical steps we remove silicon zirconium
and the rare earth elements and through all of that the lead and uranium are held on the ion
exchange column so everything else is washed away and the column is only holding the uranium
and lead then at the last step we have a clean sample beaker a small one and we wash water
through the column and water removes every element from this resin, however the only elements
left to wash out our lead and uranium so in the beaker we’re collecting absolutely purified lead in
uranium and all the other elements are removed so we dry this down o a hot plate to a single drop
and that single drop now would contain ten to a hundred pictograms of lead and a pictogram is ten
to the minus twelve grams so this is a tiny amount of lead from that crystal of zircon, so now we
have a beaker with all the lead and uranium in it from one zircon crystal or sometimes 2 zircon
crystals dissolve together we have to measure this lead and uranium we have to measure the ratio
of the isotopes of the lead and the ratio of the isotopes of the uranium to calculate an age we have
to know how much light is there and how much uranium is there we add a special solution with a
purified non-natural lead isotope that we can add a known amount to the sample before we
measure it and that is our calibration we don’t know how much of the lead of each isotope was
present in the zircon but we do know the exact amount of this unnatural light isotope which has the
mass 205 that we’ve added to the sample so we take this now to the analytical instrument we’re
going to use to measure the ratios which is a mass spectrometer because we’re measuring masses
different masses of the element lead mass 2014, 206, 207 and 208 and 206 and 207 remember are
the two masses of lead the were each produced by decay of uranium so in the mass spectrometer
we load the sample on single ribbon of very high temperature metal rhenium and we it’s attached to
electrical contacts an we load that in a sample chamber and the electrical contacts are made
contact with others in the sample chamber which is pumped down to very high vacuum so there’s
no oxygen no nitrogen no atmosphere in it when you do that you can heat the ribbon of rhenium on
which the sample has been deposited up to 1,500 degrees centigrade without it melting and when
you heat the ribbon up to that high temperature the drop that we’ve placed on this filament it’s
evaporated of course but he LED ionizes the LED loses and electron becomes a lead +1 ion and
suddenly now these are ions charged ions not atoms not neutral atoms but we focus them with a
set of electrical lenses so the series of lens is much like the series of optical lenses in a camera thar
there’s series of them with different spacings and different charges applied