Radioactive Dating

Radioactive Dating is the process of determining the age of rocks and other specimens from the decay of their radioactive elements. In practice, the Radioactive Dating techniques used today measure the time since a rock was last molten. The age of the Earth is 4.6 billion years. Nevertheless, according to Radioactive Dating techniques, the ``ages" of rocks found on its surface are far younger. When Radioactive Dating techniques are applied to meteorites they are uniformly found to be 4.6 billion years old.

There are several categories of Radioactive Dating:

• carbon dating (which only applies to once-living things)
• Fission track dating
• Luminescence dating
• the other 40 kinds (which mostly apply to rocks)

There are three primary Radioactive Dating methods: (1) uranium-thorium-lead dating, (2) rubidium-strontium dating, and (3) potassium-argon dating.

Radioactive Dating is an absolute dating system because you can determine accurate ages from the number of remaining radioactive atoms in a rock sample. Most of the radioactive isotopes used for Radioactive Dating of rock samples have too many neutrons in the nucleus to be stable. The technique of comparing the abundance ratio of a radioactive isotope to a reference isotope to determine the age of a material is called Radioactive Dating. Many isotopes have been studied, probing a wide range of time scales. Radioactive Dating is measurement of the amount of radioactive material (usually carbon 14) that an object contains; can be used to estimate the age of the object.

Radioactive Dating is a method of determining the age of a material by the ratios of various radioactive isotopes in the sample. (It has nothing to do with that blind date your "friends" arranged for you.) Depending on the isotope involved, this technique can be used to date sample ranging from a few years to billions of years. Best known example is radiocarbon dating. ¹⁴C is a radioactive isotope of carbon. It is a beta emitter with a half life of about 5720 years. It is produced in the atmosphere by high energy cosmic rays and has a concentration of about 1 ¹⁴C atom for every 10^{12 12}C atoms in the atmosphere.

So long as something is living, it is taking in CO2 from the atmosphere or from eating plants that took in the ¹⁴C. Thus, the amount of ¹⁴C in the plant or animal stays the same as the amount in the air, even though the ¹⁴C in the plant or animal is constantly disappearing due to radioactive decay. When the plant or animal dies, the exchange stops and the amount of ¹⁴C in the plant or animal becomes fixed. The remaining ¹⁴C in the plant or animal then decays as normal to ¹⁴N, but is no longer replaced. By looking at the amount of ¹⁴C in the sample, you can determine the time at which the exchange of ¹⁴C stopped: i.e., the time that the plant or animal died.

By applying this information, geologists are able to decipher the 4.6-billion-year history of the earth. The techniques used in Radioactive Dating have far reaches into many fields. There are two main processes used for this purpose the first is potassium argon dating and the second is carbon 14 dating. Carbon 14 dating is used mainly for dating organic materials such as fossilized bones and potassium argon dating is used mainly for dating rocks. The importance of these methods for dating materials is evident by the breakthroughs that were made in the fields of science and anthropology once they were available.

Anthropologists have been able to follow the evolution of man accurately by being able to date fossils that are millions of years old. Scientists also used Radioactive Dating to date rocks on the moon. The basic principle behind Radioactive Dating is the transformation of a radionucleide into its stable isotope. The ratio of one to the other allows scientists to determine the age of the material being studied. As can be seen the processes used are very important in modern culture and in discovering past.

The dating of fossils and rocks using radioactive dating techniques is considered by most to be a very reliable ‘scientific’ method. It is almost universally accepted that these procedures attribute an absolute date to rocks and therefore also to the fossils found within the rock. This results in the belief that the earth is billions of years old. The best known of these techniques is radiocarbon testing (or carbon dating).