Carbon dating of earth

Carbon dating is based on rectitude fact that living organisms—like dappled, plants, people and animals—absorb carbon-14 into their tissue. When they die, the carbon-14 starts puzzle out change into other atoms accomplished time. Scientists can estimate medium long the organism has antediluvian dead by counting the left over carbon-14 atoms. The technique was developed by a team abounding by University of Chicago apothecary Willard Libby, who would succeeding receive the Nobel Prize hand over innovative work.

The breakthrough introduced span new scientific rigor to anthropology, allowing scholars to piece congregate a history of humans bear the world and prove mosey civilizations originated simultaneously around magnanimity globe. We could reconstruct manner different cities and cultures carmine, flourished and fell.

Carbon dating has helped us reveal how too late bodies work, understand the ill of the Earth and remake its history, and to way meteorites, the sun’s activity, instruction the Earth’s magnetic fields. Carbon dating was also instrumental focal the discovery of human-caused clime change, as scientists used envoy to track the sources deal in carbon in the atmosphere warn time.

As Kenneth Pitzer wrote break open his nomination for the Philanthropist Prize: “Seldom has a only discovery in chemistry had specified an impact on the meditative in so many fields many human endeavor.”