Using Radioactivity to Measure the Age of Fossils and Other Artifacts

When we speak of the element Carbon, we most often refer to the most naturally abundant stable isotope ¹²C. Although ¹²C is definitely essential to life, its unstable sister isotope ¹⁴C has become of extreme importance to the science world. Radiocarbon Dating is the process of determining the age of a sample by examining the amount of ¹⁴C remaining against the known half-life, 5,730 years. The reason this process works is because when organisms are alive they are constantly replenishing their ¹⁴C supply through respiration, providing them with a constant amount of the isotope. However, when an organism ceases to exist, it no longer takes in carbon from its environment and the unstable ¹⁴C isotope begins to decay. From this science, we are able to approximate the date at which the organism were living on Earth. Radiocarbon dating is used in many fields to learn information about the past conditions of organisms and the environments present on Earth.