Hydrogen isotope biogeochemistry reactors in 1988, but nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s added large spikes of radioactive elements to the atmosphere, especially radiocarbon and tritium. This complicated measurements for geologists using radiometric dating of carbon. However, some oceanographers benefited from the tritium increase, utilizing the signal in the water to trace physical mixing of water masses. In biogeochemistry, scientists focused primarily on the stable isotope of deuterium as a tracer for environmental processes, especially the water cycle. The American geochemist Harmon Craig, once a graduate student of Urey's, discovered the relationship between rainwater's hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios. The linear correlation between
Kinetic isotope effect effects to be easily measured and interpreted. In contrast, secondary effects are generally very small for heavier elements and close in magnitude to the experimental uncertainty, which complicates their interpretation and limits their utility. In the context of isotope effects, "hydrogen" is frequently used to refer to the light isotope, protium (H), specifically. In the rest of this article, reference to "hydrogen" and "deuterium" in parallel grammatical constructions or direct comparisons between them should be interpreted as referring to protium and deuterium. The theory of kinetic isotope effects was first formulated by Jacob Bigeleisen in 1949. Bigeleisen's general formula for