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Why are scientists unsatisfied with using one type of element to determine the age of a rock?

User Kristian Barrett
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1 Answer

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12 votes

Answer:

Different elements have different half lives, which means that certain elements are only useful for determining the age of a rock up to a certain age. Carbon-14, for example, is great for dating archeological finds as old as 50,000 years. But that's the limit of its usefulness. I would not be useful for dating dinosaur bones. For that you would need an element with a much longer half life, such as Uranium-238, which has a half life of more than a million years.

User Gopal Sharma
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