Wiki carbon dating

17-Jul-2017 01:26

Organisms at the base of the food chain that photosynthesize – for example, plants and algae – use the carbon in Earth’s atmosphere.

They have the same ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 as the atmosphere, and this same ratio is then carried up the food chain all the way to apex predators, like sharks.

Carbon dating has a certain margin of error, usually depending on the age and material of the sample used.

Carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5730 years, and therefore it is used to date biological samples up to about 60,000 years in the past.

Atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons are called isotopes. Most carbon on Earth exists as the very stable isotope carbon-12, with a very small amount as carbon-13.

Here’s an example using the simplest atom, hydrogen. Carbon-14 is an unstable isotope of carbon that will eventually decay at a known rate to become carbon-12.

Wood contains cellulose, lignin, and other compounds; of these, cellulose is the least likely to have exchanged carbon with the sample's environment, so it is common to reduce a wood sample to just the cellulose component before testing.

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These treatments can damage the structural integrity of the sample and remove significant volumes of material, so the exact treatment decided on will depend on the sample size and the amount of carbon needed for the chosen measurement technique.

Charcoal is less likely than wood to have exchanged carbon with its environment, but a charcoal sample is likely to have absorbed humic acid and/or carbonates, which must be removed with alkali and acid washes. The constituents of bone include proteins, which contain carbon; bone's structural strength comes from calcium hydroxyapatite, which is easily contaminated with carbonates from ground water.