Does the Carbon-14 Dating Method Prove Millions of Years?
|Print This Page| |Send to a Friend| Does the Carbon-14 Dating Method Prove Millions of Years? The carbon-14 method is slightly different from other dating methods. Normal carbon has an atomic weight of 12. Carbon-14 is the unstable form produced by cosmic ray bombardment of nitrogen in the earth’s upper atmosphere. The C-14 combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which then takes its place in the great carbon cycle. That is, the carbon dioxide becomes the food for plants and trees, and these in turn become food for animals and humans. The net result is that every living thing contains normal carbon (C-12) and some C-14. When a living organism dies, it no longer takes in carbon, and the C-14 it contains at the time of death continues to decay and revert to normal nitrogen. The longer a once-living thing has been dead – whether it is wood or bone – the less C-14 it contains. Carbon-14 decays relatively quickly, and at about 50,000 years after the death of the organism no C-14 atoms
