Carbon-14

Carbon-14 Latest News

Martin Kamen and Samuel Ruben’s discovery of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in 1940 helped usher in a new era of dating artifacts from past civilizations.

About Carbon-14

• Carbon has three main isotopes: carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14. The first two are stable.
• Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon.
• It is created in the atmosphere through the bombardment of nitrogen by cosmic rays.
• It has six protons and eight neutrons in its nucleus. 
• By contrast, most of the carbon in our bodies and in the outside world, known as carbon-12, has six protons and six neutrons. 
• Crucially, those two extra neutrons make the nucleus of a carbon-14 atom unstable so that it decays radioactively into an atom of nitrogen.
• It is used in radiocarbon dating to determine the age of organic substances by measuring its decay over time.

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What is Radiocarbon Dating, or Carbon-14 Dating?

• It is a method that provides objective age estimates for carbon-based materials that originated from living organisms.
• It is based on the fact that living organisms—like trees, plants, people, and animals—absorb carbon-14 into their tissue. 
• When they die, the carbon-14 starts to change into other atoms over time. 
• Carbon-14 has a half-life of approximately 5,730 years (i.e., half the amount of the isotope present at any instant will undergo spontaneous disintegration during the succeeding 5,730 years).
• Because carbon-14 decays at this constant rate, an estimate of the date at which an organism died can be made by measuring the amount of its residual carbon-14. 
• The technique was developed in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago by a team led by chemistry professor Willard Libby, who would later receive the Nobel Prize for the work.
• It has proved to be a versatile technique of dating archaeological specimens from 500 to 50,000 years old.
• Over the years, carbon-14 dating has also found applications in geology, hydrology, geophysics, atmospheric science, oceanography, paleoclimatology, and even biomedicine.

Source: LS