Can scientists use radiocarbon dating to find the age of a very tall, old redwood tree living in an old forest?
If not please explain.
3 Responses
novangelis
21 Aug 2011
John Doe
21 Aug 2011
not typically because while radiocarbon is used to date things, if your talking about the LIFE of an organism, the organism would have to live a significantly long life because the half-life of carbon-14 is about 5730 years. a more accurate reading could be obtained by using a less stable element.
GLH
21 Aug 2011
No.
Because living things are still taking part in the Carbon Cycle and therefore renewing their composition of Carbon-14. Therefore taking a sample for C-14 dating would simply tells us what we already know – that’s it’s still alive. Only after something has died will the amount of C-14 it contains start to gradually decay away over a period of around 60,000 years which is the practical limit to C-14 dating.
Yes, the outer rings are alive, but the interior rings are deadwood. You could take a core and count back to the oldest ring to get wood that would give you an approximate date when the center was metabolically active. Of course, with that core, you could just count the rings. Counting rings in comparison to radiocarbon dating has been used to validate techniques.