Q. What is Carbon Dating?
A.
- Carbon dating, also called radiocarbon dating is method of age determination that depends upon the decay to nitrogen of radiocarbon (Carbon-14).
- This method was developed by the American physicist Willard F. Libby about 1946.
- Carbon-14 is continually formed in nature by the interaction of neutrons with nitrogen-14 in the Earth’s atmosphere.
- The neutrons required for this reaction are produced by cosmic rays interacting with the atmosphere.
Q. How it works?
A.
- Radiocarbon present in molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide enters the biological carbon cycle: it is absorbed from the air by green plants and then passed on to animals through the food chain.
- Radiocarbon decays slowly in a living organism, and the amount lost is continually replenished as long as the organism takes in air or food.
- Once the organism dies, however, it ceases to absorb carbon-14, so that the amount of the radiocarbon in its tissues steadily decreases.
Q. What is the The half-life concept?
A.
- Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 ± 40 years—i.e., half the amount of the radioisotope present at any given time will undergo spontaneous disintegration during the succeeding 5,730 years.
- Because carbon-14 decays at this constant rate, an estimate of the date at which an organism died can be made by measuring the amount of its residual radiocarbon.
Q. What Is its uses?
A.
- It has proved to be a versatile technique of dating fossils and archaeological specimens from 500 to 50,000 years old.
- The method is widely used by geologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and investigators in related fields.
