How accurate is Carbon dating?

Question

Carbon is a very unstable element that seeks to bond with anything it can.

How can you trust it.

Plus there are different time scales.

Some dating methods point at a billion year old earth, some at a hundred year old earth.

Answer 1

Dang, these science types get their feathers ruffled when you ask a simple question.

Carbon is pretty stable, and decays at a consistantly measurable rate. The rate of decay is measured and that's how they get the age of something.

The earth is older than dirt, no matter what measurement is used. Trusting these scientific types is up to you... They clocked a house with a radar gun; it was doing 35mph at the curb. They also clocked a tree doing 70mph. (What does this mean; it means you should challenge your next speeding ticket.)

Answer 2

First of all, in spite of all manner of ignorance, I know of no rational person who accepts the idea of a 100 year old earth. I've heard arguments for 2,000 years to 5,000 years based on biblical reconstructions, but none of 100 years. Scientific investigation has given us a more accurate picture in the hundreds of billions of years.

Carbon dating is highly reliable and objective. Carbon dating relies on the very breakdown that you allude to in your question and seeks to compare the level of Carbon 14 in living matter with that which has died. Other radioactive isotopes are also available that can help in the dating of ancient relics.

More information on Carbon dating can be found at the link below. Acceptance of new ideas isn't easy and Carbon and other isotope dating is still relatively new in the course of recorded human history, particularly to the "true believers", but is is scientifically sound and reliable.

Answer 3

Posting a science question in the religion and spirituality section often means the asker does not really want an answer. His goal is to ask a question that he believes proves some scientific knowledge to be wrong, or that science does not yet answer, and make the implicit claim that the only other explanation is a god, and specifically, the same god he happens to believe in.

It's the "god of the gaps" - intellectually bankrupt, since it favors ignorance instead of knowledge, and because of the contained logical fallacy.

However, on the off chance that you really want to know the answer:

Claim CD011:
Carbon-14 dating gives unreliable results.
Source:
Lee, Robert E., 1981. Radiocarbon: Ages in error. Anthropological Journal of Canada 19(3): 9-29. Reprinted in Creation Research Society Quarterly 19(2): 117-127 (1982).
Response:

1. Any tool will give bad results when misused. Radiocarbon dating has some known limitations. Any measurement that exceeds these limitations will probably be invalid. In particular, radiocarbon dating works to find ages as old as 50,000 years but not much older. Using it to date older items will give bad results. Samples can be contaminated with younger or older carbon, again invalidating the results. Because of excess 12C released into the atmosphere from the Industrial Revolution and excess 14C produced by atmospheric nuclear testing during the 1950s, materials less than 150 years old cannot be dated with radiocarbon (Faure 1998, 294).

In their claims of errors, creationists do not consider misuse of the technique. It is not uncommon for them to misuse radiocarbon dating by attempting to date samples that are millions of years old (for example, Triassic "wood") or that have been treated with organic substances. In such cases, the errors belong to the creationists, not the carbon-14 dating method.

2. Radiocarbon dating has been repeatedly tested, demonstrating its accuracy. It is calibrated by tree-ring data, which gives a nearly exact calendar for more than 11,000 years back. It has also been tested on items for which the age is known through historical records, such as parts of the Dead Sea scrolls and some wood from an Egyptian tomb (MNSU n.d.; Watson 2001). Multiple samples from a single object have been dated independently, yielding consistent results. Radiocarbon dating is also concordant with other dating techniques (e.g., Bard et al. 1990).

References:

1. Bard, Edouard, Bruno Hamelin, Richard G. Fairbanks and Alan Zindler, 1990. Calibration of the 14C timescale over the past 30,000 years using mass spectrometric U-Th ages from Barbados corals. Nature 345: 405-410.
2. Faure, Gunter, 1998. Principles and Applications of Geochemistry, 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
3. MNSU, n.d. Radio-carbon dating. http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/archaeology/dating/radio_carbon.html
4. Watson, Kathie, 2001. Radiometric time scale. http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/radiometric.html

Further Reading:
Higham, Tom, 1999. Radiocarbon WEB-Info. http://www.c14dating.com/

Answer 4

those factors are taken into consideration whilst doing the relationship. In some areas, C14 relationship can't additionally be used, so different techniques could desire to be completed to date the pattern. Scientists are no longer idiots. They comprehend approximately those issues, and appropriate for them. in the event that they can't appropriate for them, then they can't use the approach for that pattern. working example, the carbon this is dated in organic and organic keeps to be comes from the ambience, however the quantity of C14 in the ambience differences over the years. Scientists can use ice cores from Antarctica that have trapped C14 in the ice after snow falls over a hundred,000s of years to be sure how plenty to appropriate for a pattern's dates if the stratigraphy grants a coarse estimate. think approximately additionally the multitude of alternative relationship isotopic relationship practices that are used to envision and double examine the date and you eventually finally end up getting an exceedingly sturdy thought of the term, interior some years. hassle-free.

Answer 5

It's very accurate up to about 40 000 years.
Carbon dating is not used to date something as old as the Earth.

Answer 6

Carbon dating is very reliable... but is only useful for determining dates back to... oh... I think in the range of 10,000 to 15,000 years... probably closer to 10,000. Another limitation is that it only works on 'organic' materials... stuff that was once alive. No good for rocks, pottery, metals and such.

Carbon dating is of no use for finding the age of the earth, or such. For those purposes, other radiometric methods must be used.

Your last sentence is nonsense.

Answer 7

You're oversimplifying & wrong - AIUI, there are a dozen or so different ways (technologies) to carbon-date, but none go back that far (~60K). ... And there are other dating methods (e.g. radiometric dating) for things like the age of the earth.

The earth is ~4,600,000,000 years old and it took something like another ~100,000,000 years to accrete (so your 1 B / 1 hundred are both out to lunch - where did get those dates?)

Answer 8

Carbon dating does not go back far enough for it to factor into the determination of how old the earth is.

Answer 9

14C dating is very accurate for objects up to 10's of thousands of years, and is used a lot for archaeology to date human artifacts.

other radioactive elements are used for older ages, such as the age of the earth or dinosaur fossils. these have a much longer half-life. if the half-life of the element is near the order of the age of the object, then the method is very accurate (within 5% or better).

Answer 10

First off, it's a function of the relative frequency of radioactive to non-radioactive carbon, so it has nothing whatsoever to do with carbon's chemical reactivity.

Second, carbon dating doesn't work past about 60,000 years. There are other dating methods for longer periods of time.