RADIO CARBON DATING

Description

Radiocarbon Dating (¹⁴C Dating) is a method that uses the radioactive isotope carbon-14 as a natural chronometer to determine the age of organic materials up to about 50,000 years. Since its discovery by Libby in 1949, ¹⁴C dating has revolutionized archaeology and geology and has been applied in many fields, including biomedicine, climatology, hydrology, oceanography, environmental physics, and volcanology.

¹⁴C is a cosmogenic isotope produced by cosmic-ray interactions with atmospheric nitrogen (¹⁴N). Living organisms maintain a constant ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio, which decreases exponentially after death with a mean life of about 8,300 years. Measuring the remaining ¹⁴C in a sample allows calculation of the time elapsed since the organism stopped absorbing carbon. Ages are reported in years “before present” (BP), where “present” is defined as 1950 AD, typically with an uncertainty of about ±20 years, which can vary depending on calibration curves.

Since 2005, ISOCORE has performed high-precision radiocarbon dating on a wide range of samples, including wood, charcoal, seeds, shells, foraminifera, bones, teeth, textiles, paper, peat, paleo soils, soil organic matter, and tree rings, often requiring less than one milligram of material thanks to accelerator-based mass spectrometry.

Radiocarbon dating is applicable to prehistoric and historic artifacts up to 1700 CE with ±20-year precision. For samples between 1700 and 1955 CE, precision is reduced due to the “Suess effect.” For samples post-1955 CE, anthropogenic ¹⁴C from nuclear testing allows dating with high precision, often within a year.