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Air is not an acronym!
From Chair Phil Dunn and Director Jim Carter –
The international measurement standard for nitrogen isotope delta is atmospheric nitrogen. This is often referred to as Air-N2, NAIR, N2 AIR, or simply Air.
“Air” in this context is simply air; it is not an acronym unlike some other international reference materials such as VSMOW (Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water), VPDB (Vienna Peedee belemnite), or VCDT (Vienna Cañon Diablo troilite).
There are instances in the literature describing the nitrogen isotope delta measurement standard as “AIR” being an abbreviation for “ambient inhalable reservoir” or “ambient inhalable reference.”
One possible origin of these incorrect acronyms was noted by a reviewer of an article submitted to the journal Geochronology. The open review of Reviewer 1 of this manuscript has the following within their comment on line 100 of the submission:
…and once and for all: AIR is not an acronym, it is just air. The standard is Atm. N2. I.e., the d15N value of all N2 in all the air everywhere on earth is 0 per mille. “Ambient Inhalable Reservoir” is a stupid joke that Henry Schwarcz or somebody made to an archaeologist in the 1980s and the archaeologist thought they were serious. Everyone else did an emperor’s new clothes after that because they didn’t want to look ignorant while “doing isotopes”.
Incidents of this misuse are small (certainly in comparison to the numbers of papers reporting nitrogen isotope-delta values) and mostly occur in papers reporting isotopic analyses in archaeological contexts. This would appear to support Reviewer 1 as being at least pretty close to the truth.
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