AssignmentOf Carbon DATING

Submitted by: M Noaman Noon

Roll no.:
31
Submitted to:DR. SHAZIA ASIM

Department of earth
sciences

 Basics of radiocarbon dating

The term radiocarbon is commonly used to denote 14C, an isotope of carbon which is
radioactive with a half-life of about 5730 years. 14C is produced by cosmic rays in the
stratosphere and upper troposphere. It is then distributed throughout the rest of the
troposphere, the oceans, and Earths other exchangeable carbon reservoirs.
In the surface atmosphere, about one part per trillion (ppt) of carbon is 14C.
All organisms absorb carbon from their environment. Those that absorb their carbon
directly or indirectly from the surface atmosphere have about 1 ppt of their carbon
content as 14C. Such organisms comprise almost all land-dwelling plants and animals.
(Other organismse.g. fishhave slightly less of their carbon as 14C; this affects how
radiocarbon dating works, and there are methods of adjusting for it.)

Decaying limits of Carbon:

When an organism dies, carbon stops being absorbed. Hence after 5730 years, about
half of its 14C will have radioactively decayed (to nitrogen): only about 0.5 ppt of the
carbon of the organisms remains will be 14C. And if the carbon of the remains is found
to be 0.25 ppt14C, then the organism would be assumed to have died about 11 460 years
ago. Thus, a simple calculation can find the age, since death, from any
14C concentration. (Remains older than about 50 000 years, however, have a C concentration
that is in practice too small to measure; so they cannot be dated via 14C.)

Ages are conventionally reported together with the standard deviation of the laboratory
14
C measurement, e.g. 90025 14C BP (14C-dated, years Before Present). This should be
doubled to obtain a 95%-confidence interval, e.g. 850950 14C BP. (The true range of
95%-confidence, though, will often be larger than this, due to nonlaboratory sources of
errore.g. the admixture of impurities with the remains.)
Although a tree may live for hundreds, even thousands, of years, each ring of a tree
absorbs carbon only during the year in which it grows. The year in which a ring was
grown can be determined exactly (by counting); so radiocarbon dating can be tested by
measuring the 14C concentrations in old tree rings. Such testing found errors of up to
several centuries. It turns out that the concentration of 14C in the carbon of the surface
atmosphere has not been a constant 1 ppt, but has varied with time. Thus the simple
calculation of age from 14C concentration is unreliable.
Tree rings, though, also provide a solution to this problem. The concentration of
14C in the carbon of an organisms remains can be compared with the concentrations in tree
rings; the tree rings that match, within confidence limits, give the years in which the organism
could have plausibly died. Ages determined this way are called calibrated 14C ages; others are
called uncalibrated14C ages, or simply 14C ages, and continue to be reported as 14C BP.
(Calibration via tree rings, though, does not extend for 50 000 years, only several thousand.

Other ways of calibrating are therefore being developed.) Calibrated 14C ages are generally
greater than uncalibrated14C ages, with the differences increasing with age.

DECAYING OF RADIOACTIVE ELEMANTS

Radioactive substances decay exponentially, and the mass at time t is m(t) = m(0)ekt,
where m(0) is the initial mass and k is a negative constant dependent upon the specific
substance and how quickly it decays. The mean life M of an atom in the substance (that
is, the mean time until the atom decays), is given by

For the radioactive carbon-14 isotope used in radiocarbon dating, k = 0.000121. Find
the mean life of a carbon-14 atom.
Substituting the appropriate quantities, we obtain

As we have an infinite limit of integration, we have

Using integration by parts and substitution or formula 102 in the back of the text, we
obtain

Principle
During its life, a plant or animal is exchanging carbon with its surroundings, so the
carbon it contains will have the same proportion of 14C as the atmosphere. Once it dies,
it ceases to acquire 14C, but the 14C within its biological material at that time will
continue to decay, and so the ratio of 14C to 12C in its remains will gradually decrease.
Because 14C decays at a known rate, the proportion of radiocarbon can be used to
determine how long it has been since a given sample stopped exchanging carbon the
older the sample, the less 14C will be left.[10]
The equation governing the decay of a radioactive isotope is:[4]

Simplified version of the carbon exchange reservoir

Carbon is distributed throughout the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the oceans; these
are referred to collectively as the carbon exchange reservoirand each component is also
referred to individually as a carbon exchange reservoir. The different elements of the
carbon exchange reservoir vary in how much carbon they store, and in how long it takes
for the 14C generated by cosmic rays to fully mix with them. This affects the ratio
of 14C to 12C in the different reservoirs, and hence the radiocarbon ages of samples
that originated in each reservoir The atmosphere, which is where 14C is generated,
contains about 1.9% of the total carbon in the reservoirs, and the 14C it contains mixes
in less than seven years The ratio of 14C to12C in the atmosphere is taken as the
baseline for the other reservoirs: if another reservoir has a lower ratio of 14C to 12