Carbon dating common belief
03-Mar-2020 10:28
None of the articles consider whether the finding will cause changes to radiocarbon dating results.
That seems unlikely, since calibration of the method depends on the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere, which was already known.
Other corrections must be made to account for the proportion of throughout the biosphere (reservoir effects).
Additional complications come from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, and from the above-ground nuclear tests done in the 1950s and 1960s.
It’s a slow process since 14C has a radioactive half-life of 5,730 years, but it is predictable, meaning that organic samples can be dated by measuring the ratio of 12C to 14C still remaining.
These results are important as they demonstrate a previously unknown source of isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon.
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The older a sample is, the less (the period of time after which half of a given sample will have decayed) is about 5,730 years, the oldest dates that can be reliably measured by this process date to around 50,000 years ago, although special preparation methods occasionally permit accurate analysis of older samples.However, it is significant that a discovery of this magnitude, involving something as common as lightning, was made this late in the history of physics.
