Major help dont understand?

Question

can someone describe how to find the concept of using radioactive elements to establish an age for a fossil and how the parent and daughter elements are used in the determination of age.

Answer 1

Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years.[1] Raw, i.e. uncalibrated, radiocarbon ages are usually reported in radiocarbon years "Before Present" (BP), "Present" being defined as AD 1950. Such raw ages can be calibrated to give calendar dates.

The technique of radiocarbon dating was discovered by Willard Libby and his colleagues in 1949[2] during his tenure as a professor at the University of Chicago. Libby estimated that the steady state radioactivity concentration of exchangeable carbon-14 would be about 14 disintegrations per minute (dpm) per gram. In 1960, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for this work. He first demonstrated the accuracy of radiocarbon dating by accurately measuring the age of wood from an ancient Egyptian royal barge whose age was known from historical documents.

One of the frequent uses of the technique is to date organic remains from archaeological sites. Plants fix atmospheric carbon during photosynthesis, such that the level of 14C in living plants (and the animals that consume them) approximately equals the level of 14C in the atmosphere. A difference due to isotope fractionation is corrected after laboratory analyses.

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