Radiocarbon Dating - Measurements and Scales

Measurements and Scales

Measurements are traditionally made by counting the radioactive decay of individual carbon atoms by gas proportional counting or by liquid scintillation counting. For samples of sufficient size (several grams of carbon) this method is still widely used in the 2000s. Among others, all the tree ring samples used for the calibration curves (see below) were determined by these counting techniques. Such decay counting, however, is relatively insensitive and subject to large statistical uncertainties for small samples. When there is little carbon-14 to begin with, the long radiocarbon half-life means that very few of the carbon-14 atoms will decay during the time allotted for their detection, resulting in few disintegrations per minute.

The sensitivity of radiocarbon dating has been greatly increased by the use of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). With this technique 14C atoms can be detected and counted directly, as opposed to detecting radioactive decay. Radiocarbon AMS samples are prepared by completely burning the sample, collecting the resulting carbon dioxide, and reducing it to a solid carbon target for sputtering atomic carbon ions into the mass spectrometer. This method allows dating samples containing only a few milligrams of carbon.

Raw radiocarbon ages (i.e., those not calibrated) are usually reported in "years Before Present" (BP). This is the number of radiocarbon years before 1950, based on a nominal (and assumed constant – see "calibration" below) level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere equal to the 1950 level. These raw dates are also based on a slightly-off historic value for the radiocarbon half-life. Such value is used for consistency with earlier published dates (see "Radiocarbon half-life" below). See the section on computation for the basis of the calculations.

Radiocarbon dating laboratories generally report an uncertainty for each date. For example, 3000 ± 30 BP indicates a standard deviation of 30 radiocarbon years. Traditionally this included only the statistical counting uncertainty. However, some laboratories supplied an "error multiplier" that could be multiplied by the uncertainty to account for other sources of error in the measuring process. More recently, the laboratories try to quote the overall uncertainty, which is determined from control samples of known age and verified by international intercomparison exercises. In 2008, a typical uncertainty better than ±40 radiocarbon years can be expected for samples younger than 10,000 years. This, however, is only a small part of the uncertainty of the final age determination (see section Calibration below).

Samples older than the upper age-limit cannot be dated because the small number of remaining intrinsic 14C atoms will be obscured by 14C background atoms introduced into the samples while they still resided in the environment, during sample preparation, or in the detection instrument. As of 2007, the limiting age for a 1 milligram sample of graphite is about ten half-lives, approximately 60,000 years. This age is derived from that of the calibration blanks used in an analysis, whose 14C content is assumed to be the result of contamination during processing (as a result of this, some facilities will not report an age greater than 60,000 years for any sample).

A variety of sample processing and instrument-based constraints have been postulated to explain the upper age-limit. To examine instrument-based background activities in the AMS instrument of the W. M. Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory of the University of California, a set of natural diamonds were dated. Natural diamond samples from different sources within rock formations with standard geological ages in excess of 100 Ma yielded14C apparent ages 64,920 ± 430 BP to 80,000 ± 1100 BP as reported in 2007.