Why is carbon dating wrong

Inaccuracies in radiocarbon dating

Dating is everything in archaeology. Exciting discoveries of ancient burial sites or jewellery might make headlines, but for scientists, this kind of discovery is only meaningful if we can tell how old the artefacts are. So when chemist Willard Libby developed radiocarbon dating in , it was a breakthrough for archaeology and he was awarded a Nobel prize for his achievement. Nowadays people take radiocarbon technology for granted and many people think you can use radiocarbon on any human remains. But my team may have found the key: DNA dating.

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When news is announced on the discovery of an archaeological find, we often hear about how the age of the sample was determined using radiocarbon dating, otherwise simply known as carbon dating. Deemed the gold standard of archaeology, the method was developed in the late s and is based on the idea that radiocarbon carbon 14 is being constantly created in the atmosphere by cosmic rays which then combine with atmospheric oxygen to form CO2, which is then incorporated into plants during photosynthesis. When the plant or animal that consumed the foliage dies, it stops exchanging carbon with the environment and from there on in it is simply a case of measuring how much carbon 14 has been emitted, giving its age. But new research conducted by Cornell University could be about to throw the field of archaeology on its head with the claim that there could be a number of inaccuracies in commonly accepted carbon dating standards. If this is true, then many of our established historical timelines are thrown into question, potentially needing a re-write of the history books. In a paper published to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the team led by archaeologist Stuart Manning identified variations in the carbon 14 cycle at certain periods of time throwing off timelines by as much as 20 years. The possible reason for this, the team believes, could be due to climatic conditions in our distant past.

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Radiocarbon dating can easily establish that humans have been on the earth for over twenty thousand years, at least twice as long as creationists are willing to allow. Therefore it should come as no surprise that creationists at the Institute for Creation Research ICR have been trying desperately to discredit this method for years.

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How do geologists use carbon dating to find the age of rocks?

At least to the uninitiated, carbon dating is generally assumed to be a sure-fire way to predict the age of any organism that once lived on our planet. Without understanding the mechanics of it, we put our blind faith in the words of scientists, who assure us that carbon dating is a reliable method of determining the ages of almost everything around us. However, a little more knowledge about the exact ins and outs of carbon dating reveals that perhaps it is not quite as fool-proof a process as we may have been led to believe. At its most basic level, carbon dating is the method of determining the age of organic material by measuring the levels of carbon found in it. Specifically, there are two types of carbon found in organic materials: carbon 12 C and carbon 14 C

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