The Carbon 14 isotope was discovered by Martin David Kamen and Sam Ruben in 1944. Carbon 14 Dating is used to determined the age of historical artifacts like charcoal, wood, twigs, seeds, bones, shells, leather, peat, lake muds, soil, ice cores, pollen, hair, pottery, metal ores, well paintings, rock art, iron, meteorites, eggshells, coral, blood residue, fabrics, paper, fish bones, resins, antlers, and even water. The list goes on and on.
Basically, if an object is 50,000 years old or less, its age can be determined by measuring how many Carbon 14 is left in the object. Carbon 14 is a radioactive element with a half life of approximately 5,730 years, which keeps splitting in exactly two equals parts until it is completely deteriorated in that 50,000 years.
Carbon 14 is created everyday, because everyday that passes, sunlight hits the Earth. The rays of the sun penetrate the Earths atmosphere, and smash into an atom. The collision of the two creates another ray, or a neutron. The neutron goes crashing into a nitrogen atom in the air, the Nitrogen 14 atom turns into a Carbon 14 atom. The Carbon 14 atom connects with a hydrogen atom, and therefore you have your radioactive material.
Not all radioactive material is harmful. Many plants, the air, the water you drink, and many other natural things have naturally occurring radioactivity that you come into contact with every day. Carbon 14 occurs in natural things when an oxygen combines with Carbon 14. This becomes what is commonly know as carbon dioxide.
Plants take in and produce carbon dioxide during the photosynthesis process, which is where the leaves of a plant take up the nutrients of the sun; the leaves also ingest the carbon dioxide from the air. When the plant/living object of some kind dies it becomes a fossil, but the carbon it contained is replaced, because it is not a radioactive material; Carbon 14 is not reproduced.
Unfortunately, due to the uprise in the worlds technology after th 1940's, carbon dating (and dating using other elemental materials) is less effective, and has become more of an age estimate of an object. Environmental contamination effects the accuracy of the testing. The reason the accuracy of Carbon 14 dating dropped after the 1940's is that nuclear bombs, nuclear power, and nuclear waste are changing to environment in seemingly subtle ways, unnoticeable to the naked eye.
The reason that nuclear power contaminates the environment is that nuclear fission is used, which produces hazardous waste; nuclear fission requires nonrenewable fuel sources. Nuclear energy is not the only culprit in the situation, however. The atmosphere itself is because contaminated by factories, cars, standard power plants, and many other business that are necessary to our survival with the rise of technology. If the atmosphere itself is contaminated, then the actual process of creating Carbon 14 is disturbed.
Another unfortunate drawback to using Carbon 14 dating are its many limitations. Most fossils that are dated using Carbon 14 need to be larger objects, because part of the object is broken down and lost when it is cleaned and distilled. The loss of the part may cause an inaccurate date given to the object.
The methods for dating smaller fossil are still under experimentation. You must be very careful when collecting fossils and packaging them, because they can become cross contaminated with other objects containing fresh Carbon. If they object is from a more recent time, the dating may be inaccurate because the Carbon 14 hasnt had enough time to decay, making it more difficult to take a correct measurement.
Changes in the atmosphere, particularly the thinning of the ozone, cause more Carbon 14 to be produced, so the standard measurement of the Carbon 14 existing in the time used to compare with the fossil must be transferred to the correct amount, and these changes have not yet occurred. Many miscalculations are possible, which could change the history that many of us believe to be true our whole lives.
Considering the impact that the discovery of Carbon 14 dating had on archeology, the method of dating has been used for thousands of discoveries, and all of it could be incorrect. The entire Egyptian history that most crave to know more about could be entirely wrong. It is entirely possible that Carbon 14 dating is an accurate method of dating, however it has not proven to be an exact science.
Carbon 14 Dating has come a long way since its discovery in 1944. The radioactive carbon dating was discovered in nuclear laboratories.. The news of Carbon 14 dating spread rapidly from the nuclear laboratories, to the University of Chicago, to Yale. Originally it was used by measuring the decay of the carbon with Geiger counters (the lower the radioactivity was, the older the carbon was), and trying to test the Carbon 14 using explosive gasses like acetylene to support the Carbon 14 under microscopes.
In the 1950's Liquid Scintillation systems were used to measure Carbon 14, where the Carbon 14 could be measured by ionizing the radiation. Then, in 1977, Accelerator Mass Spectrometer measurements were made by separating the Carbon 14 and the Carbon 12 in a particle accelerator according to their weight. Then the particles could be counted, and the age of the object could be identified.
Carbon 14 has been used to determine the age of many things other artifacts alone. Any forest across this land can be given an age. If you cut a tree down at its trunk, at looked at the circular base, youd see many rings. The rings are equal to the number of years that tree has lived; those rings are the trees Carbon 14.
