Radioactive dating animation

Radioactive dating

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website. To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser. Donate Log in Sign up Search for courses, skills, and videos. Evidence for evolution. About About this video Transcript. Carbon forms in the atmosphere through cosmic rays interacting with nitrogen, creating a small fraction of carbon in living organisms. When an organism dies, its carbon decays back into nitrogen at a known rate, called a half-life 5, years.

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Understand how decay and half life work to enable radiometric dating. Play a game that tests your ability to match the percentage of the dating element that remains to the age of the object. Radioactive dating of rocks and fossils is often misunderstood, even by some scientists. It is not a circular process, and leads to ever-more-reliable data, supported from a number of different avenues. This excerpt offers some insight into the issue, follow the link for the entire article:.

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Radioactive material gets a bad rap, what with radiation and fallout and nuclear waste and all. But it offers some practical uses. One of the coolest OK, maybe the coolest is using radioactive carbon to determine the age of old bones or plants. To understand this, you must first understand radioactivity and decay.

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Radiometric dating

When a radioactive nucleus decays, it does so randomly. Lots of nuclei of the same isotope, however, will decay following a pattern called a radioactive decay curve. In decay, a radioactive parent nucleus close nucleus The central part of an atom.

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