Carbon 14 Dating

Carbon-14 Dating Essay

Some fossils today can be over one billion years old or even older. For anybody who has ever wondered how it is possible to determine an object's age without having any eyewitnesses, the scientific explanation is within carbon-14 dating. Although carbon-14 dating can't be used to determine the age of all the artifacts on the planet, the categories which carbon-14 cannot be used to date are few. A physical chemist named Willard Frank Libby discovered carbon-14 dating in the year 1949 and had won the Noble Prize in Chemistry for his great discovery. In 1947, Willard first proposed his idea of carbon-14 dating but hadn't perfected the process until after twelve years of research. His research was finally complete in the year 1959. His discovery revolved around the fact that plants absorb carbon during photosynthesis and also various amounts of carbon-14. When the plants die, they no longer absorb any of this carbon and the carbon-14 decays at a predictable rate. Willard discovered this decay rate and studied it until he was able to use it to determine the age of plant-based artifacts. Geologists, archeologists, anthropologists and other scientists have utilized his discovery extensively to date their own discoveries and in the past, Carbon-14 has been used to determine the age of mummies and prehistoric artifacts such as fossils. Libby's dating technique has proved extremely useful to scientists everywhere.

Something that must be clarified is that the chemical that is used in dating the artifacts previously listed is not just carbon by itself but instead an "isotope" of carbon which is carbon-14. In comparison, these chemicals have very similar properties because they still have the same amount of electrons and protons. The only part of the element that has been altered is the number of neutrons and therefor the atomic mass. For example, if the number of neutrons in carbon had increased, the atomic mass will increase accordingly. If there are two extra neutrons in carbon's element then the atomic mass will increase by two as well. This change in atomic mass is what makes carbon an isotope and changes carbon's name to carbon-14. Carbon has three main isotopes, which are carbon-12, carbon-13, and the remarkable carbon-14. Since carbon-14 is the most radioactive, it is the radioactivity that is used to measure age and date plant-based artifacts. The radioactive atoms decay into stable atoms by a simple mathematical process regarding carbon-14's half-life. A half-life is the time it takes for atoms to divide in half. For example, if 600 atoms in the year 1990 had a half-life of 40 years, then in the year 2030 there would only be 300 atoms left. Carbon-14 can be used to date artifacts by counting how many carbon-14 atoms are in an object with carbon in it. This information will tell us how long ago the artifact had died. The