# How to do carbon dating math dating tips for high school

The second characteristic of the measurement of radiocarbon is that it is easy to contaminate a sample which contains very little radiocarbon with enough radiocarbon from the research environment to give it an apparent radiocarbon age which is much less than its actual radiocarbon age.

For example, a sample with a true radiocarbon age of 100,000 radiocarbon years will yield a measured radiocarbon age of about 20,000 radiocarbon years if the sample is contaminated with a weight of modern carbon of just 5% of the weight of the sample's carbon.

Also, it does not coincide with what creationist scientists would currently anticipate based upon our understanding of the impact of the Flood on radiocarbon.

The shells of live freshwater clams can, and often do, give anomalous radiocarbon results.

A fossil found in an archaeological dig was found to contain 20% of the original amount of 14C. I do not get the $-0.693$ value, but perhaps my answer will help anyway.

If we assume Carbon-14 decays continuously, then $$C(t) = C_0e^,$$ where $C_0$ is the initial size of the sample. Since it takes 5,700 years for a sample to decay to half its size, we know $$\frac C_0 = C_0e^,$$ which means $$\frac = e^,$$ so the value of $C_0$ is irrelevant.

There are two characteristics of the instrumental measurement of radiocarbon which, if the lay observer is unaware, could easily lead to such an idea.

First, any instrument which is built to measure radiocarbon has a limit beyond which it cannot separate the signal due to radiocarbon in the sample from the signal due to background processes within the measuring apparatus.

## One thought on “how to do carbon dating math”

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