radiocarbon dating (redirected from carbon dating)

carbon-14 dating

 or radiocarbon dating

Method of determining the age of once-living material, developed by U.S. physicist Willard Libby in 1947. It depends on the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 (radiocarbon) to nitrogen. All living plants and animals continually take in carbon: green plants absorb it in the form of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and it is passed to animals through the food chain. Some of this carbon is radioactive carbon-14, which slowly decays to the stable isotope nitrogen-14. When an organism dies it stops taking in carbon, so the amount of carbon-14 in its tissues steadily decreases. Because carbon-14 decays at a constant rate, the time since an organism died can be estimated by measuring the amount of radiocarbon in its remains. The method is a useful technique for dating fossils and archaeological specimens from 500 to 50,000 years old and is widely used by geologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists.

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radiocarbon dating

a technique for determining the age of organic materials, such as wood, based on their content of the radioisotope ¹⁴C acquired from the atmosphere when they formed part of a living plant. The ¹⁴C decays to the nitrogen isotope ¹⁴N with a half-life of 5730 years. Measurement of the amount of radioactive carbon remaining in the material thus gives an estimate of its age