Willard Libby

Beta Analytic Inc., located in Miami, Florida, was founded in 1979 with a commitment to meet the demand of radiocarbon dating with rapid delivery and responsiveness to customer needs. The now mature Cultural Resource Management industry continues to rely heavily on Beta Analytic for its radiocarbon dating needs.

Over time, carbon-14 decays in predictable ways. And with the help of radiocarbon dating, researchers can use that decay as a kind of clock that allows them to peer into the past and determine absolute dates for everything from wood to food, pollen, poop, and even dead animals and humans.

Absolutely. It is an accurate way to date specific geologic events. This is an enormous branch of geochemistry called Geochronology. There are many radiometric clocks and when applied to appropriate materials, the dating can be very accurate.

Here is yet another mechanism that can cause trouble for radiometric dating: As lava rises through the crust, it will heat up surrounding rock. Lead has a low melting point, so it will melt early and enter the magma. This will cause an apparent large age. Uranium has a much higher melting point.

The best-known techniques for radioactive dating are radiocarbon dating, potassium-argon dating and uranium-lead dating. In any material containing a radioactive nuclide, the proportion of the original nuclide to its decay products changes in a predictable way as the original nuclide decays over time.

Holocene

By dating the rocks in Earth’s ever-changing crust, as well as the rocks in Earth’s neighbors, such as the moon and visiting meteorites, scientists have calculated that Earth is 4.54 billion years old, with an error range of 50 million years.

Fossils are physical evidence of preexisting organisms, either plant or animal. Fossils of any kind are useful in “reading the rock record,” meaning they help us decipher the history of the earth. They can help us determine the geologic age and environment (the paleoenvironment) in which they were deposited.

Paleozoic Era

Five types of evidence for evolution are discussed in this section: ancient organism remains, fossil layers, similarities among organisms alive today, similarities in DNA, and similarities of embryos.

Fossils provide our only direct evidence for when life appeared on Earth. They are found in sedimentary rock, which is rock formed when fine particles of mud, sand, or dust entombed an organism before it can be eaten by other organisms.