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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.
humans would have invented a new "dating" method
From http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/cardat.html:
"Krane points out that future carbon dating will not be so reliable because of changes in the carbon isotopic mix. Fossil fuels have no carbon-14 content, and the burning of those fuels over the past 100 years has diluted the carbon-14 content. On the other hand, atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s increased the carbon-14 content of the atmosphere. Krane suggests that this might have doubled the concentration compared to the carbon-14 from cosmic ray production."
Silly customer! You cannot hurt the twinkie!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... or already broken, depending on your viewpoint.
While fossil fuels reduce atmospheric C14, atmospheric nuclear detonations increase it dramatically.
In 1963, C14 levels reached double the earlier level.
But even before any of that, radiocarbon dating needed to be calibrated according the varying level of atmospheric CO2 over the aeons.
And it is already easy to make fake ancient parchment or paper using greenhouses and fossil fuel.
Combining carbon dating with other techniques should be enough to remove ambiguity in dating.
"Other techniques" not only have different ranges of time for which they're accurate, they also have different levels of accuracy. (And not all are applicable to all materials.) They may or may not be sufficient to resolve ambiguity.
As I am the one who submitted this article I need to point out an error
The radioactive C-14 isotopes do not decay into "stable carbon isotopes" but rather, into stable N-14 isotopes via beta decay !
Please accept my sincere apology for the error - it was the fault of no other but me alone, for not noticing that glaring error when I was copy-pasta-ing from articles of three different sites
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Yeah... I bet that the "New Earth" creationists will be touting this headline for years, even though they don't really understand most of the words in it.
They've been spouting doubt about carbon dating methods for years, and fall back to the "God CREATED it with age!" excuse if you're crazy enough to refute their claims with actual scientific information.
Oh, wait, we already did.
Carbon 14 dating hasn't been reliable (usable) for wood or other biological material formed since 1950, as open air nuclear testing put a lot of C14 into the atmosphere. This C14 has been slowly leaving the atmosphere, but it's not gone yet.
I think that the writers of the original article were just eager to get some attention, as they surely must have known this.
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.
What's the problem with selling dead baby parts? I could see there being a problem with killing the baby after it's born to get those parts, but otherwise, what exactly is your problem?
Would you rather have them go to waste? What are you, a commie? It's not very capitalist to not sell your trash if you can!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Breathing is not the way humans (and other animals) take up carbon. It comes from the food we eat. So burning coal to heat your home doesn't have any direct effect on your personal C14 level.