Dating of artifacts and fossils may become much more common thanks to a new instrument.
Without doubt, radiocarbon dating has been an exciting and contentious process. It has been able to resolve disputes about the construction date of archaeological sites, such as Hezekiah’s Tunnel in Jerusalem (9/10/03). Creationists find radiocarbon all over in places it shouldn’t be (see Real Science Radio’s list), such as coal and diamonds; evolutionists cry “contamination!” (Note: all radiocarbon should vanish from a sample before 100,000 years). Resolving disputes has been costly and time-consuming. Typically, the best results come from labs with equipment for accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS), but only 100 or so labs worldwide have the equipment.
What would happen if you could get radiocarbon dates almost as accurate as AMS at one tenth the cost, within two hours? This may become common, if the encouraging announcement from Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Ottica lives up to its promises. Science Daily says,
The instrument, which uses a new approach called saturated-absorption cavity ring-down (SCAR), is described in The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research, Optica. SCAR offers significant time and cost savings compared to the standard approach for carbon dating and could be useful for a host of other applications such as measuring emissions from fossil fuels or certifying the amount of biogenic content in biofuels..
I posted the entire story on my Facebook page today.
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