Extraction Technique for the Determination of Oxygen-18 in Water Using Preevacuated Glass Vials

The need for a rapid, inexpensive technique for routine 18O/16O extraction from water has arisen recently through applications in the medical sciences and in hydrology. The traditional experimental technique for determining the oxygen isotope composition of water, the CO2-H2O equilibration method, is tedious, time consuming, and involves the use of custom-made glass apparatus. Furthermore, because of potential memory effects from one sample to the next, the glassware needs to be thoroughly cleaned between runs. A few attempts have been made to improve upon the method. Attempts to analyze water directly in the source of the mass spectrometer produced large memory effects and questionable results. Commercially available apparatus for automated extraction of 18O/16O from water is generally prohibitively expensive and often is designed to interface only with the manufacturer's own mass spectrometer. The method described in this paper utilizes inexpensive, off-the-shelf, preevacuated, glass vials. Preevacuated vials have been used by others for the isotopic analysis of breath CO2 and are well tested. The vials can be purchased in bulk from scientific apparatus suppliers at a relatively low cost. These are coupled with a simplified extraction line consisting of a stainless steel syringe needle and a glass cold trap. Vials are filled with CO2 and H2O and shaken in a constant-temperature water bath for at least 90 min. Since the vials are discarded after use, no cleaning is necessary, essentially eliminating any memory effect. Reproducibility is generally better than +/- 0.05%. The only reagents required are gaseous CO2 for equilibration, a dry ice/alcohol mixture for trapping water, and liquid nitrogen for transferring the CO2.