I want to date gas emitted from soil (permafrost) and determine where this carbon comes from (what depth).
From what I saw in the literature, the only way to do this is to do incubations and then link the results with the field values.
Are there other ways?
I don't know the answer, but this seems like a challenging question because the gases emitted to the atmosphere are presumably produced at multiple depths. It seems that one approach would be to measure the age of CO2/CH4 that are produced at various depths, the rate of CO2/CH4 production at those depths, and then do some modeling of vertical gas transport through the soil. Then you could figure out the sources of the CO2 and CH4 at any depth throughout the soil column, including at the soil surface.
I am not a specialist in measurements, but maybe this idea could help:
Assuming that the gas is coming from organic sources that were deposited in the last few tenthousand years, you could possibly use the radiocarbon method. For that you need to have a well defined piece of soil for calibration of the C14/C12 ratio. Then placing a collecting device onto the soil area to measure the C14 abundance in the gases coming from the soil (important, that no surrounding air gets into the measurement). That way you should get the age of the material where the gas is emitted from. If you then take some assumptions on the sedimentation of organic material in the area, you should be able to track down the depth of emission.
Of course, if there are emissions from different depths, things might not be so easy to determine anymore
Brief procedure briefly given by D. Hani and method suggested by Dr.Sebastian may work.
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