There is a lot of information here, but it is really not that complicated.

A. Sample data line. These have 10 fields, as follows. Here is an example:

	PH-1	41.3567	-70.7348	91	std	4.5	2.65	1	0.00008	1999;
	

A.1. Sample name. Same as version 2 - a text string not exceeding 24 characters. Can include letters, numbers, and dashes (hyphens). May not contain white space or anything that even vaguely resembles an escape character, e.g., slashes of either direction, commas, quotes, colons, or semicolons.

A.2. Latitude. Same as version 2. Decimal degrees: north positive, south negative.

A.3. Longitude. Same as version 2. Decimal degrees: east positive, west negative.

A.4. Elevation/pressure. Same as version 2: meters or hPa, depending on selection below.

A.5. Elevation/pressure handling flag. Same as version 2; this is a three-letter text string. If you have supplied elevations in meters and the default elevation/pressure relationship (currently a spatially variable scheme based on the ERA-40 reanalysis, courtesy of Nat Lifton) is applicable at your site, enter "std" here. If you have supplied elevations in meters, your site is in Antarctica, and you want to use an Antarctic-specific elevation/pressure relationship, enter "ant" here. If you have entered pressure in hPa, enter "pre" here. Any text other than these three options will cause an error.

A.6. Sample thickness. Same as version 2. Centimeters.

A.7. Sample density. Same as version 2. Grams per cubic centimeter.

A.8. Shielding correction. Same as version 2; a shielding factor between 0 and 1.

A.9. Erosion rate inferred from independent evidence. Same as version 2. Centimeters per year.

A.10. Date of sample collection. This is not in version 2. The idea here is so that paleomagnetic reconstructions for the last couple of hundred years are correctly aligned with the date the sample was collected. Of course, this issue is totally irrelevant for samples that are more than a few hundred years old, and it's probably irrelevant for young samples too. In any case, you only need to worry about this at all if you have really young samples. Thus, you can also enter zero and a default date of 2010 will be assumed.

A.11. Then the line ends with a semicolon.

B. Nuclide concentration lines.

In general, all the lines describing nuclide concentration measurements have information in the following order: the name of the corresponding sample; the nuclide measured; the mineral in which it is measured; the nuclide concentration and uncertainty; and then standardization information, which varies by nuclide, at the end. The currently available set of nuclide-mineral pairs is as follows:

	He-3	quartz
	He-3	olivine
	He-3	pyroxene
	Be-10	quartz
        Be-10   pyroxene 
	C-14	quartz
	Al-26	quartz
	Ne-21	quartz
	

The chlorine-36 online calculator is separate, so Cl-36 concentration lines are supported but can't be used in the same input block as these nuclide-mineral pairs. Either you are preparing input for (anything that is not Cl-36), or you are preparing input for Cl-36. Cl-36, of course, requires not only a Cl-36 concentration line but also additional lines for major and trace element compositions. The format of all these types of line is documented below; a description of the overall picture for Cl-36 data is in the introductory material above.

Exotica such as Ne-21 in sanidine or Be-10 in olivine are not, at present, supported. The following sections detail the format of the data entry lines for all the nuclide-mineral pairs listed above.

B.1. Be-10-in-quartz, Be-10-in-pyroxene, and Al-26-in-quartz measurement lines. These have 6 fields, as follows. Here are examples of both:

	PH-1	Be-10	quartz	123453	3717	KNSTD;
	PH-1	Al-26	quartz	712408	31238	KNSTD;
	

B.1.1 Sample name. This must exactly match the sample name of the corresponding sample as entered in the sample data line, or else, obviously, the code will not be able to match samples to nuclide concentration measurements.

B.1.2. and B.1.3. Nuclide-mineral pair. For Be-10 in quartz, enter "Be-10" and "quartz"; for Be-10 in pyroxene, "Be-10" and "pyroxene"; for Al-26 in quartz, this is "Al-26" and "quartz."

B.1.4. and B.1.5. Nuclide concentration and uncertainty. Atoms per gram. Standard or scientific notation.

B.1.6. Name of Be-10 or Al-26 standardization. This is familiar from version 2. Acceptable values for this parameter are given on this page.

B.1.7. Then the line ends with a semicolon.

B.2. C-14-in-quartz measurement lines. This has 5 fields, as follows. Here is an example:

	10-MPS-046-NNS	C-14	quartz	4.71E+05	1.20E+04;
	

B.2.1. Sample name. As above, must exactly match sample name entered in corresponding sample data line.

B.2.2 and B.2.3. Nuclide-mineral pair. Here "C-14" and "quartz".

B.2.4. and B.2.5. Nuclide concentration and uncertainty. Atoms per gram. Standard or scientific notation.

No standardization information is required for C-14 measurements. We assume that carbon isotope ratios have been standardized according to the well-developed and longstanding internationally accepted procedures.

B.2.6. Then the line ends with a semicolon.

B.3. He-3-in-quartz, He-3-in-pyroxene, and He-3-in-olivine measurement lines. These have seven fields, as follows. Here is an example:

	10-MPS-046-NNS	He-3	quartz	2.50E+06	2.73E+05	CRONUS-P	5.20E+09;
	

B.3.1. Sample name. As above, must exactly match sample name entered in corresponding sample data line.

B.3.2 and B.3.3. Nuclide-mineral pair. Here the nuclide is "He-3" and acceptable mineral options are "quartz," "olivine," and "pyroxene."

B.3.4. and B.3.5. Nuclide concentration and uncertainty. Atoms per gram. Standard or scientific notation. Note that this should be the concentration of actual cosmic-ray-produced He-3; any corrections for magmatic or otherwise non-cosmogenic helium should already have been done.

B.3.6. Name of standard material. For noble gas measurements, the option is available to carry out interlaboratory standardization by entering the apparent concentration of a widely distributed mineral standard as measured at your laboratory. See further discussion below.

B.3.7. He-3 concentration in standard material as measured at the lab where the sample was analysed. Atoms per gram. Standard or scientific notation.

B.3.8. Then the line ends with a semicolon.

The overall concept for standardization information for noble gas measurements is that different noble gas labs obtain slightly different apparent He-3 concentrations for the same standard material. At present, the only such standard is the CRONUS-P pyroxene standard, which is described in the following reference:

Blard, P-H., G. Balco, P. G. Burnard, K. A. Farley, C. R. Fenton, R. Friedrich, A. J. T. Jull et al. "An inter-laboratory comparison of cosmogenic He-3 and radiogenic He-4 in the CRONUS-P pyroxene standard." Quaternary Geochronology (2014).

It can be argued that if lab 1 finds that CRONUS-P has a concentration that is 5% lower than the concentration found by lab 2, then He-3 concentrations in other samples measured by lab 1 should be adjusted upward by 5% prior to being compared with He-3 concentrations in other samples measured by lab 2. Or, the concentrations measured by lab 2 could be adjusted downward for comparison with lab 1.

So what happens in the online calculator is that if you measure He-3 in an unknown sample, and your lab has also measured He-3 in the CRONUS-P standard, you enter both pieces of information and the online calculator will normalize the He-3 measurement in the unknown sample by the amount needed to make your measurement of CRONUS-P agree with a consensus value (which in this case is 5.02e9 atoms/g; see the Blard paper). Furthermore, the idea is that the production rate used to compute exposure ages will also be based on measurements normalized to the same value for CRONUS-P (note, however, that it is unclear if this is the case at present).

This whole approach is not, at present, common practice for cosmogenic noble gas measurements. So if you think this is stupid, or you don't want to worry about it, you can enter "NONE" in position 6 and zero in position 7, for example:

	10-MPS-046-NNS	He-3	quartz	2.50E+06	2.73E+05	NONE	0;
	

In this case no restandardization happens and your He-3 concentration gets processed as is.

B.4. Ne-21-in-quartz measurement lines. These are very similar to the He-3 measurement lines; they have seven fields, as follows. Here is an example:

	05-WO-140-BR	Ne-21	quartz	299185727	4884352	CRONUS-A	3.32E+08;
	

B.4.1. Sample name. As above, must exactly match sample name entered in corresponding sample data line.

B.4.2 and B.4.3. Nuclide-mineral pair. Here the nuclide is "Ne-21" and the mineral is "quartz."

B.4.4. and B.4.5. Nuclide concentration and uncertainty. Atoms per gram. Standard or scientific notation. Note that this should be the concentration of what you believe to be actual cosmic-ray-produced Ne-21; any corrections for trapped, magmatic, atmospheric, nucleogenic, 'crustal,' or otherwise non-cosmogenic neon should already have been done.

B.4.6. Name of standard material. As for the He-3 measurements, the option is available to carry out interlaboratory standardization by entering the apparent concentration of a widely distributed mineral standard as measured at your laboratory. See discussion above in He-3 section. For Ne-21, two options are supported: "CREU-1" (348e6 atoms/g) and "CRONUS-A" (320e6 atoms/g). Both are discussed at length in the following reference. If no restandardization desired, enter "NONE."

Vermeesch, Pieter, Greg Balco, Pierre-Henri Blard, Tibor J. Dunai, Florian Kober, Samuel Niedermann, David L. Shuster et al. "Interlaboratory comparison of cosmogenic Ne-21 in quartz." Quaternary Geochronology (2012).

B.4.7. Ne-21 concentration in standard material as measured at the lab where the sample was analysed. Atoms per gram. Standard or scientific notation. If no restandardization desired, enter zero.

B.4.8. Then the line ends with a semicolon.

B.5. Cl-36 measurement lines. A Cl-36 measurement doesn't generally have to associated with any particular mineral (and the chemical composition of the sample is entered separately), so there is no information about what mineral was analyzed in this line. It just contains the sample name, the Cl-36 concentration and uncertainty, and the chloride concentration and uncertainty (because Cl-36 and total Cl concentrations are nearly always both measured by AMS, and often measured simultaneously). Here is an example:

	Jom2018-Ker-34 Cl-36 2.173e+05 7.829e+03 17.68 0.90; 
	

Note that the format changes slightly if you intend to associate multiple Cl-36 measurements on different aliquots with a single sample. If you are doing this, then all the measurement lines (Cl-36, major elements, trace elements, formation age) should have an aliquot identifier (alphanumeric plus dashes) as the second element. In this case the above line would look like this:

	Jom2018-Ker-34 Plag-A Cl-36 2.173e+05 7.829e+03 17.68 0.90; 
	

indicating a specific aliquot called 'Plag-A'. Note that if you are indicating specific aliquots for the Cl-36 measurement, you must also have major element, trace element, and formation age (if present) lines indexed to the same aliquot. Any aliquot mentioned must have a complete set of chemistry data.

B.5.1. Sample name. As above, must exactly match sample name entered in corresponding sample data line.

B.4.2.Nuclide. Here the nuclide is "Cl-36."

B.4.3. and B.4.4. Cl-36 concentration and uncertainty. Atoms per gram. Standard or scientific notation. Note that this should be the total Cl-36 concentration: corrections for nucleogenic Cl-36 happen later in the process.

B.4.5 and B.4.6. Cl concentration and uncertainty. Units of ppm weight (ug/g).

B.4.7. Then the line ends with a semicolon.

C. Independent age control data line. There also exists a third type of data line that enables entering production rate calibration data. This is needed for data entry for the production rate calibration interface to the v3 online calculators here.

Lots of correctly formatted calibration data can be found at ICED: PRODUCTION RATE CALIBRATION.

For v3 calibration data input, independent ages are assumed to have units of "years BP" defined as in the radiocarbon calibration literature and meaning years before 1950.

Note that this differs from the output of the exposure age calculator, which is the calculated exposure duration of the sample, that is, the number of years the sample has been exposed prior to collection, rather than a specific calendar year. Suppose you enter a single calibration sample that was collected in 2014 and whose independent age is 11,000 yr BP, and use a production rate calibrated from that sample to compute the exposure age of the same sample. In this case the calculated exposure age will not be 11,000 years, but 11064 years (11000 + (2014-1950)). Confusing at first glance, but the point to remember is that the independent calibration ages have to be in years before 1950.

This type of line has either 5 or 7 fields, as follows.

A line with five fields applies if the independent age is the exact age of the sample. Here is an example with five fields:

	06-SKY-03 true_t FEAR 11700 300;
	

C.1. Sample name. As above, must exactly match sample name entered in corresponding sample data line.

C.2. Designation as independent age data. The string 'true_t' signals that this line contains independent age information. No other values are allowed.

C.3. Name of the calibration site. This aids downstream code in grouping samples by site. Same rules as sample name -- numbers, letters, no spaces.

C.4. Independent age. Years.

C.5. Uncertainty in independent age. Years.

C.6. Then the line ends with a semicolon.

A line with seven fields indicates that there are minumum and maximum independent age constraints, rather than an exact age. Here is an example with seven fields:

	CI2-01-2 true_t CLYDE 7950 45 8435 50;
	

In this case, positions 4 and 5 contain the minumum limiting age and uncertainty (years), and positions 6 and 7 contain the maximum limiting age and uncertainty. For example, the line above indicates a minimum limiting age of 7950 +/- 45 years BP, and a maximum limiting age of 8435 +/- 50 years BP.

In the case where there is only a minimum age constraint, one would enter Inf for the maximum age; likewise, if there is only a maximum age constraint, the minimum age would be zero.

	CI2-01-2 true_t CLYDE 7950 45 Inf 0;
	CI2-01-2 true_t CLYDE 0 0 8435 50;
	

D. Chemical composition lines.

These describe the chemical composition of the bulk rock sampled, as well as the chemical composition of a target fraction, usually a single mineral, that was extracted for the nuclide concentration measurement. At present, these are only used in Cl-36 calculations, but potentially they could be used for other nuclides in compositionally variable targets (He-3 and Ne-21 in pyroxene or olivine, Ne-21 in feldspars...you get the idea). Basically they consist of an identifier for whether the measurements pertain to the whole rock (WR) or a target fraction, and then a list of elemental symbols and concentrations.

D.1. Major element composition. For Cl-36 calculations, one could have either (i) a single one of these lines describing a case where the Cl-36 measurement is made on the whole rock, or (ii) two lines describing the bulk rock and a target mineral fraction separately. Here's an example of the two-line case:

	Jom2018-Ker-34 major_elements target LOI 1.0 O 46.6 Na 2.7 Mg 1.9 Al 8.2 Si 24.7 P 0.1 K 1.2 0.1 Ca 6.0 0.1 Ti 2.0 0.1 Mn 0.1 Fe 6.6 0.1; 
	Jom2018-Ker-34 major_elements WR LOI 2.1 O 46.2 Na 2.6 Mg 2.5 Al 8.7 Si 22.5 P 0.2 K 1.1 Ca 6.3 Ti 1.6 Mn 0.1 Fe 8.2; 
	

If you were assigning these to a specific aliquot the form would be:

	Jom2018-Ker-34 Plag-A major_elements target LOI 1.0 O 46.6 Na 2.7 Mg 1.9 Al 8.2 Si 24.7 P 0.1 K 1.2 0.1 Ca 6.0 0.1 Ti 2.0 0.1 Mn 0.1 Fe 6.6 0.1; 
	Jom2018-Ker-34 Plag-A major_elements WR LOI 2.1 O 46.2 Na 2.6 Mg 2.5 Al 8.7 Si 22.5 P 0.2 K 1.1 Ca 6.3 Ti 1.6 Mn 0.1 Fe 8.2; 
	

D.1.1. Sample name. As above, must exactly match sample name entered in corresponding sample data line.

D.1.2. and D.1.3. Identifiers. The second element is always "major_elements" exactly, and the third can be "WR" (for the whole rock) or "target" (for the target fraction)

D.1.4...D.1.x Element names and concentrations.. The rest of the line consists of (element name, concentration) pairs or (element name, concentration, uncertainty) triplets. The element name must be a recognized chemical symbol or "LOI" to indicate loss on ignition as commonly reported in an XRF analysis. The concentrations are in units of weight percent (100 * g element / g sample); note that this does require conversion from an XRF result. The order of the elements should not matter, and it shoudl be possible to mix pairs (i.e., a measurement with no uncertainty) and triples (including the uncertainty). Normally the elements would include everything typically reported in an XRF or similar measurement, plus O. Sometimes one might enter only the concentrations of important target elements (e.g., Ca, K for Cl-36) in the target line; this should be OK. Note that even though you can enter an uncertainty, lots of uncertainties in this section will never be used...most calculation schemes will only care about the uncertainties in the major target element concentrations (Ca and K in the Cl-36 case).

D.2. Trace elements related to neutron transport. Again, at least one of these lines describing the trace element concentration in the whole rock is required for a Cl-36 calculation. Example:

	Jom2018-Ker-34 trace_elements Li 4.9 B 2.0 Cl 56.0 Cr 76.2 Co 34.8 Sm 7.6 Gd 7.2 Th 3.6 U 0.8;
	

If you were assigning this to a specific aliquot the form would be:

	Jom2018-Ker-34 Plag-A trace_elements Li 4.9 B 2.0 Cl 56.0 Cr 76.2 Co 34.8 Sm 7.6 Gd 7.2 Th 3.6 U 0.8;
	

D.2.1. Sample name. As above, must exactly match sample name entered in corresponding sample data line.

D.2.2.Identifier. The second element is always "trace_elements" exactly. There is no 'WR' or 'target' identifier, because for most neutron transport calculations this is only relevant for the bulk rock. This might have to be changed in future for some applications.

D.2.3...D.2.x Element names and concentrations.. The rest of the line consists of (element name, concentration) pairs or (element name, concentration, uncertainty) triplets. The element name must be a recognized chemical symbol. The concentrations are in units of ppm by weight (ug/g). The order of the elements should not matter, and it shoudl be possible to mix pairs (i.e., a measurement with no uncertainty) and triples (including the uncertainty). This line would normally include Li, B, Cl, Sm, Gd, U, and Th; Co and Cr are sometimes reported in the Cl-36 literature as well. Note that although you can enter uncertainties, there is no guarantee that the calculation will actually use all the uncertainties -- although some of them are sometimes important (e.g., U and Th for Cl-36), most of these uncertainties will generally be ignored by calculation methods.

E. Rock formation age line.

This is sometimes needed for Cl-36 measurements when the formation age of the rock is not old enough that you can just assume that the nucleogenic Cl-36 concentration has reached steady state. Note: if you don't know the formation age but you know it's old enough to assume steady state, that is the default assumption, so this line can be omitted. In any case, here is an example:

	Jom2018-Ker-34 formation_age_Ma 17.00 0; 
	

If you are indexing this line to a specific aliquot, it would look like:

	Jom2018-Ker-34 Plag-A formation_age_Ma 17.00 0; 
	

E.1. Sample name. As above, must exactly match sample name entered in corresponding sample data line.

E.2.Identifier. "formation_age_Ma", exactly.

E.3. and E.4. Formation age and uncertainty.. Millions of years (Ma). At the moment, if you want to signal to the code that the formation age of the rock is unknown, but is the same as the exposure age (this happens when you are exposure-dating lava flows), enter zeros in both positions. It is necessary to use this line to signal this condition -- as noted above, if this line is not present, steady state is assumed.

E.5. Then the line ends with a semicolon.