CARBON DATING
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In News
- Varanasi district court has allowed a petition aspiring carbon dating of the structure inside the Gyanvapi mosque that the Hindu side has claimed as ‘Shivling’.
Carbon Dating
- The carbon dating method is used to confirm the age of organic material, things that were once living.
- Most living things on Earth are made up of carbon. Living things need carbon in order to live, grow, and reproduce.
- Plants get their carbon through the process of photosynthesis, and animals get it mainly through food.
- When they die, the intake and outgo of carbon stop, because metabolism stops.
- The Carbon dating method uses “C-14” an isotope of carbon; it is radioactive and decays at a rate that is reasonably known.
- Carbon-14 reduces to one-half of itself in about 5,730 years. This is known as its ‘half-life’.
- Half-life is the time required for a quantity to reduce to half of its initial value.
- Generally Carbon dating cannot be used to determine the age of non-living things, like rocks.
- Things having more than 40,000-50,000 years of age cannot be conformed through carbon dating, as after 8-10 cycles of half-lives, the amount of carbon-14 becomes nearly negligible and undetectable.
- There are other methods to calculate the age of non-living things, but carbon dating can also be used indirectly in specific cases.
- For example, the age of the ice cores in glaciers and Polar Regions is demarcated using the carbon dating method by examining the carbon dioxide molecules trapped inside large ice sheets.
- If there are organic materials, dead plants or insects trapped under the rock, they can give an indirect hint of when that rock, or any other thing, had reached that place.
- There are also different methods to date sedimentation around an object; the methods are used depending on the specific circumstances.
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