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What can cause carbon dating Alright, I know there's
controversy about whether or
not it's accurate anyways, BUT
assuming that it is accurate,
what are some things that can
mess with the results of a
carbon dating test?
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There's no controversy in the scientific world as to whether or not radioactive dating techniques are accurate. They are accepted 100%. Properly applied, they work every time. The 'controversy' only comes from people who have pre-set mind view of the way the world should work, and try to make everything conform to that. That's not what science is about. OK, now that we got that out of the way, isotopes used for radioactive dating have what's called a half-life. That's how long it takes for approximately half of the material present to decay. If the half-life was, say, 5700 years (carbon 14), then we can accurately use C14 to date things on that kind of a time scale, up to say maybe 20 times that, with any real accuracy. After that, the probabilitistic error bars keep getting larger, and you find another isotope that has a longer half-life to measure something by. Also, contaminations can occur that will make something look older or younger than it really is. Contaminations are very well understood, and we can often detect them in other ways, and correct for their contamination. For example, anything that lived in the water (fish, whales, etc) we can't use carbon dating on because we cannot accurately correct for the contaminations. Hope that helped. Wikipeda has this in a lot more detail if you're really interested. |
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Nowadays, assuming the work is done carefully, making all of the known adjustments, the only significant question is whether the C14 level in the atmosphere was always at the same level. A lot of factors could make a difference, like major variations in volcanic activity or the strength of the earth's magnetic field. |
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