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Essay on Radioactive Dating
Introduction
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.
What is an isotope?
According to Williams “An alternate form of an element that has the usual number of protons but a nonstandard number of neutrons; the fewer or additional neutrons give the isotope a different atomic weight than the regular element and may make the isotope radioactive, but otherwise an isotope has the same chemical action as the regular element. Because of this, isotopes (such as radioactive carbon) are used as tracers in biological systems or processes.” (Williams, pp. 2-5)
What is half life?
The rate at which a radioactive isotope decays is measured in half-life. The term half-life is defined as the time it takes for one-half of the atoms of a radioactive material to disintegrate. Half-lives for various radioisotopes can range from a few microseconds to billions of years.
|
Radioisotope |
Half-life |
BPolonium-215 |
0.0018 seconds |
ismuth-212 |
60.5 seconds |
Sodium-24 |
15 hours |
Iodine-131 |
8.07 days |
Cobalt-60 |
5.26 years |
Radium-226 |
1600 years |
Uranium-238 |
4.5 billion years |
Can rocks be carbon-dated?
As Giem explains “The half-lives of certain types of radioisotopes are very useful to know. They allow us to determine the ages of rocks and fossils. Scientists can use the half-life of Carbon-14 to determine the approximate age of organisms and objects less than 40,000 years old. By determining how much of the carbon-14 has transmutated, scientist can calculate and estimate the age of a substance. This technique is known as carbon dating.” (Giem, pp. 6-22)
This technique is best for dating items which died between on the order of 1000 to on the order of 1,000,000 years ago.................
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