'RCarb': Dose Rate Modelling of Carbonate-Rich Samples - an Implementation of Carb in R -

Abstract

Geochemical conditions (e.g., pH-value, temperature, availability of CO2) in carbonate-rich sedimentary environments lead to cementation processes, i.e., air or water in the pore space are substituted by mineral phases. Consequently, in such environments the conventional formalism of estimating the environmental dose rate from U, Th and K concentrations (pores are filling by air or water) cannot be overall correct. In 2008, Nathan & Mauz (2008) presented a model to account for dose-rate changes occurring when carbonate minerals replace air and water in the pore space between mineral grains. The underlying MATLAB R code (Carb) was later published by Mauz & Hoffmann (2014). Here we present an implementation of this tool using the statistical programming environment R. Our implementation does not alter the underlying model and its assumption but comes with an updated code basis published as R package under GPL-3 licence conditions.