Question

how do archaeologist date their fuel

Answer 1

Seventy years ago, American chemist Willard Libby devised an ingenious method for dating organic materials. His technique, known as carbon dating, revolutionized the field of archaeology.

Now researchers could accurately calculate the age of any object made of organic materials by observing how much of a certain form of carbon remained, and then calculating backwards to determine when the plant or animal that the material came from had died. This technique, which won Libby the Nobel Prize in 1960, has allowed researchers to date tattoos on ancient mummies, establish that a British library held one of the world’s oldest Qurans, and figure out that most trafficked ivory comes from elephants killed within the last three years.

Today, the amount of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into Earth’s atmosphere is threatening to skew the accuracy of this technique for future archaeologists looking at our own time. That’s because fossil fuels can shift the radiocarbon age of new organic materials today, making them hard to distinguish from ancient ones. Thankfully, research published yesterday in the journal Environmental Research Letters offers a way to save Libby’s work and revitalize this crucial dating technique: simply look at another isotope of carbon.