Radiocarbon dating simple explanation

How Carbon Dating Works

You probably have seen or read news stories about fascinating ancient artifacts. An archaeologist finds a child mummy high in the Andes and says the child lived more than 2, years ago. How do scientists know how old an object or human remains are? What methods do they use and how do these methods work? Radiocarbon dating, or carbon dating for short, is a way of determining the age of certain archeological artifacts of a biological origin up to about 50, years old. It is used in dating things such as bone, cloth, wood and plant fibers that human activities created in the relatively recent past. For example, every person is hit by about half a million cosmic rays every hour. It is not uncommon for a cosmic ray to collide with an atom in the upper atmosphere, creating a secondary cosmic ray in the form of an energetic neutron, and for these energetic neutrons to collide with nitrogen atoms. When the neutron collides, a nitrogen seven protons, seven neutrons atom turns into a carbon atom six protons, eight neutrons and a hydrogen atom one proton, zero neutrons.

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Radiocarbon dating , also known as the C14 dating method , is a way of telling how old an object is. It is a type of radiometric dating. The method uses the radioactive isotope carbon Most organic matter contains carbon. Carbon has different isotopes , which are usually not radioactive. This makes it possible to tell the age of substances that contain carbon. The method works to about 60, years old.

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Willard Libby and Radiocarbon Dating

Radiocarbon dating is one of the most widely used scientific dating methods in archaeology and environmental science. It can be applied to most organic materials and spans dates from a few hundred years ago right back to about 50, years ago - about when modern humans were first entering Europe. For radiocarbon dating to be possible, the material must once have been part of a living organism. This means that things like stone, metal and pottery cannot usually be directly dated by this means unless there is some organic material embedded or left as a residue.

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