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Fossil Fuels Are Messing With Carbon Dating
Taco Cowboy writes: The carbon dating method used in determining the age of an artifact is based on the amount of radioactive carbon-14 isotopes it contains. The C-14 within an organism is continually decaying into stable carbon isotopes, but since the organism is absorbing more C-14 during its life, the ratio of C-14 to C-12 remains about the same as the ratio in the atmosphere. When the organism dies, the ratio of C-14 within its carcass begins to gradually decrease. The amount of C-14 drops by half every 5,730 years after death.
The fossil fuels we're burning are old — so old they don't contain any C-14. The more we burn these fossil fuels, the more non-C-14 carbon we pump into the atmosphere. If emissions continue as they have for the past few decades, then by year 2050 a shirt made in that year (2050) will have the same C-14 signature as a shirt worn by William the Conqueror a thousand years earlier.
The fossil fuels we're burning are old — so old they don't contain any C-14. The more we burn these fossil fuels, the more non-C-14 carbon we pump into the atmosphere. If emissions continue as they have for the past few decades, then by year 2050 a shirt made in that year (2050) will have the same C-14 signature as a shirt worn by William the Conqueror a thousand years earlier.
Carbon dating is already unreliable as it depends on a number of unprovable assumptions
Interestingly this isn't the first time this happened.. When they first started Isotopic dating there seemed to be no lab pure enough to get the lead out. Even water taken from the widdle of the ocean had the wrong lead isotope ratios. Eventually, years, they realized it was in the air from all the lead in gasoline. The gasoline companies had the guy's funding cut off to suppress this, and trotted out a bunch of "tobacco scientists" to ridicule the guy who discovered it. But eventually this too became fact. Now it's used in reverse, the isotopic ratio of lead is used to track gasoline spill origins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.