archaelogists use a technique known as carbon dating to determine the age of ancient skeltons and fossils.?

Question

how might they do this

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Answer 1

There is always a certain amount of radioactive 14C in the air, because of the effect of high-energy particles (cosmic rays) bombarding the atmosphere. As long as anything is alive, it is exchanging carbon with the atmosphere, and a very small but known fraction of this is 14C.

Once something dies, this exchange stops, and the 14C starts decaying. It has a known half-life (5,730 yr), so that if (just to make the math easy) you analyse something and find that the fraction of 14C in the material is 1/4 that in things that had just died, you know that your specimen died 11,460 years (two half-lives) ago.

We know that the method works, and can correct for things like variation in the intensity of the cosmic ray background, because we can apply it to tree rings, where we really know the age very accurately by counting. Also, historic documents if we know when they were generated.

A famous example of the use of carbon dating is the Shroud of Turin, which some people thought was 2000 years old, but were shown to be about a third of that age.

Answer 2

Carbon occurs as 2 isotopes C12 & C14. The ratio of these 2 isotopes is constant in living matter but when dead there is no further consumption of carbon and the ratio changes with time (at a known rate) as C14 decays to C12. By measuring the ratio of C12 to C14 the age can be calculated.

Answer 3

Carbon 14 or 14C is a rare form of carbon. it naturally decays to nitrogen over time at a predictable rate...so i have some carbon 14 and i know how long it will take to turn into nitrogen 14. well a living thing has carbon 14 in it. the important fact is that a living creature keeps recycling its carbon but as soon as it dies this process stops. at this point onwards the amount of 14C decreases (turning into 14N). Clever men measure the amount of 14C left and work backwards to see when it died.

Answer 4

Why do no longer you place "carbon relationship" right into a seek engine and study it your self? you will get a greater precise and informative answer greater instantly than right here. i will supply you a clue: carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope.