C dating

British Broadcasting Corporation Home. Radio carbon dating determines the age of ancient objects by means of measuring the amount of carbon there is left in an object. In , he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This is now the most widely used method of age estimation in the field of archaeology. Certain chemical elements have more than one type of atom.

Radiocarbon dating also referred to as carbon dating or carbon dating is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon , a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was developed in the late s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby , who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in It is based on the fact that radiocarbon 14 C is constantly being created in the atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. The resulting 14 C combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide , which is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis ; animals then acquire 14 C by eating the plants. When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with its environment, and thereafter the amount of 14 C it contains begins to decrease as the 14 C undergoes radioactive decay. Measuring the amount of 14 C in a sample from a dead plant or animal, such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone, provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died.

In this section we will explore the use of carbon dating to determine the age of fossil remains. Carbon is a key element in biologically important molecules. During the lifetime of an organism, carbon is brought into the cell from the environment in the form of either carbon dioxide or carbon-based food molecules such as glucose; then used to build biologically important molecules such as sugars, proteins, fats, and nucleic acids. These molecules are subsequently incorporated into the cells and tissues that make up living things.

The key difference between carbon dating and uranium dating is that carbon dating uses radioactive isotopes of carbon, whereas uranium dating uses uranium , which is a radioactive chemical element. Carbon dating and uranium dating are two important methods of determining the age of different organic materials. We call them isotopic dating methods. The oldest method among them is Uranium-Lead dating method.