Carbon isotope half-life

In archeology and forensics, carbon-14 (half-life of 5,700 years) dating has been used extensively, since living things absorb carbon, but when they die, no new carbon is absorbed and the rate of decay of the absorbed carbon gives a good measure to the time of death. This can be used only for a certain length of time (about 60,000 years), but other isotopes, such as potassium-40 (half-life... 

Carbon has seven isotopes. In 1961 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry adopted the isotope carbon-12 as the basis for atomic weights. Carbon-14, an isotope with a half-life of 5715 years, has been widely used to date such materials as wood, archaeological specimens, etc. 

The constant half-life of a nuclide is used to determine the ages of archaeological artifacts. In isotopic dating, we measure the activity of the radioactive isotopes that they contain. Isotopes used for dating objects include uranium-238, potassium-40, and tritium. However, the most important example is radiocarbon dating, which uses the decay of carbon-14, for which the half-life is 5730 a. 

Most CO and CO2 in the atmosphere contain the mass 12 isotope of carbon. However, due to the reaction of cosmic ray neutrons with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, C is produced. Nuclear bomb explosions also produce C. The C is oxidized, first to CO and then to C02 by OH- radicals. As a result, all CO2 in the atmosphere contains some 0, currently a fraction of ca. 10 of all CO2. Since C is radioactive (j -emitter, 0.156 MeV, half-life of 5770 years), all atmospheric CO2 is slightly radioactive. Again, since atmospheric CO2 is the carbon source for photos5mthesis, aU biomass contains C and its level of radioactivity can be used to date the age of the biological material. 

The content of the material in a carbon reservoir is a measure of that reservoir s direct or indirect exchange rate with the atmosphere, although variations in solar also create variations in atmospheric content activity (Stuiver and Quay, 1980, 1981). Geologically important reservoirs (i.e., carbonate rocks and fossil carbon) contain no radiocarbon because the turnover times of these reservoirs are much longer than the isotope s half-life. The distribution of is used in studies of ocean circulation, soil sciences, and studies of the terrestrial biosphere. 

Carbon-14 ( C) is a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 5.73 X 10 years. The fractional amount of... 

A final, highly specialized procedure for monitoring carbon flow in plants involves the use of "CO . The use of this positron gamma-emitting isotope of C, with a half-life of 20.3 min, allowed several physiological parameters of my-corrhizal and non-mycorrhizal plants of Panicum coloratum to be measured simultaneously in real time (82). However, the technical problems associated with using "COi, particularly the ability to produce i.sotopes of carbon, and with handling this short half-life are likely to limit this approach to specialised facilities. 

The name was debated. The priority for the production lay with the Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna (Russia), under the leadership of G. N. Flerov, where 238U was bombarded with 22Ne. The half-life was about 2.7 seconds. At the University of California, bombardment of curium with carbon gave rise to an isotope with a half-life of 58 minutes. The IUPAC commission suggested the name "lerovium", but nobelium persisted. 

The half-life (t1 ) of a radioisotope is the amount of time it takes for that isotope to undergo radioactive decay and be converted into another. It is also a measure of the stability of the isotope the shorter its half-life, the less stable the isotope. The half-life of radioisotopes ranges from fractions of a second for the most unstable to billions of years for isotopes that are only weakly radioactive. In the case of radiocarbon (carbon-14), for example, the half-life is 5730 years (see Fig. 61). 

FIGURE 61 The decay of radiocarbon. Radiocarbon is a radioactive isotope whose half-life is 5730 + 40 years. This means that half of the original amount of radiocarbon in any carbon-containing sample will have disintegrated after 5730 years. Half of the remaining radiocarbon will have disintegrated after 11,400 years, and so forth. After about 50,000 years the amount of radiocarbon remaining in any sample is so small that older remains cannot be dated reliably. 

The half-lives of some radioisotopes are measured in billions of years for others, the half-life is measured in fractions of seconds. Following are some examples of the half-lives of a few isotopes uranium-238 = 4.6 billion years carbon-14 = 5730 years strontium-90 = 38 years phosphorus-32 = 14.3 days radon-222 = 3.8 days uranium-239 = 23.5 minutes. 

Three groups had roles in the discovery of nobelium. First, scientists at the Nobel Institute of Physics in Stockholm, Sweden, used a cyclotron to bombard Cu-244 with heavy carbon gC-13 (which is natural carbon-12 with one extra neutron). They reported that they produced an isotope of element 102 that had a half-life of 10 minutes. In 1958 the team at Lawrence Laboratory at Berkeley, which included Albert Ghiorso, Glenn Seaborg, John Walton, and Torbjorn Sikkeland, tried to duplicate this experiment and verify the results of the Nobel Institute but with no success. Instead, they used the Berkeley cyclotron to bombard cerium-... 

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