A radioisotope will decay at a fixed rate as a value known as its half-life. In this case, the parent isotope will eventually decay and form a daughter isotope. It does this by losing nuclear particles over time. Radioisotopes are unstable but they eventually decay into a stable isotope. By observing the ratio of isotopes in a fossil, the number of half-lives can be calculated and thus the approximate age of the fossil determined.
Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. To determine the age of a dinosaur fossil, carbon dating can never be used. Carbon-14 only works for fossils less than 75,000 years old. By the time a dinosaur fossil was found, any carbon-14 the organism would have taken up and incorporated into its tissues during its life, would have decayed too much to be useful as a tool to determine its age. Carbon-14 has a half life of 5730 years and this radioisotope eventually decays into Nitrogen-14.
However, the isotope uranium-235 has a half-life of 704 million years. It decays to lead-207. Therefore, in a dinosaur fossil, only a small fraction of U-235 would have decayed and the age of the fossil could be determined by the ratio of U-235 to Pb 207 found in the specimen.
https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nvhe.sci.chemistry.decay/radioactive-decay-of-carbon-14/
https://www.thoughtco.com/uranium-lead-dating-1440810
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Why don't we use radio carbon dating for dinosaur bones?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
Find the indefinite integral $\displaystyle \int \sec^4 \left( \frac{x}{2} \right) dx$. Illustrate by graphing both the integrand and its an...
-
Determine $\displaystyle \frac{dy}{dx}$ of $y^5 + x^2y^3 = 1 + x^4 y$ by Implicit Differentiation. $\displaystyle \frac{d}{dx}(y^5) + ...
-
Determine the area of the region bounded by the hyperbola $9x^2 - 4y^2 = 36$ and the line $ x= 3$ By using vertical strips, Si...
-
Find the integral $\displaystyle \int^1_0 \frac{1}{\sqrt{16 t^2 + 1}} dt$ If we let $u = 4t$, then $du = 4dt$, so $\displaystyle dt = \frac{...
-
Determine the integral $\displaystyle \int \frac{\sin^3 (\sqrt{x})}{\sqrt{x}} dx$ Let $u = \sqrt{x}$, then $\displaystyle du = \frac{1}{2 \s...
-
Gertrude's comment "The lady protests too much, methinks" in act 3, scene 2, of Shakespeare's Hamlet exposes her own guilt...
-
Given y=cos(2x), y=0 x=0,x=pi/4 so the solid of revolution about x-axis is given as V = pi * int _a ^b [R(x)^2 -r(x)^2] dx here R(x) =cos(2x...
No comments:
Post a Comment