why is radiocarbon dating only rarely applied in geological work?
I think the reason we don’t apply radiocarbon dating to geological work is because it’s so difficult. The geological process is basically the same as the scientific process in that there are several levels of understanding that go into the dating process. At the most basic level, there is the understanding that we are actually seeing a sample of a fossil that has been in the earth for millions of years.
To put it simply, there are two ways to get the sample of the fossil to the lab. Either you get it out of the ground and move it to a lab, or you can send it to a lab the way a normal sample would be sent. Radiocarbon dating uses a radiocarbon-based process of splitting the sample into sub-samples, and then determining the amount of carbon in any given sample. The amount of carbon is what we are looking for.
Radiocarbon dating is a relatively simple process, but it has a few problems, including that it cannot tell you what the carbon in the sample is made out of, whether it is organic or inorganic, or what the age of the sample is. It also cannot tell you what kind of sample it is, whether it is shale or sedimentary, or whether it is from a deep sea or shallow ocean sample.
The reason we don’t use radiocarbon dating is because there is no standard age range. The only thing that radiocarbon dating tells you is what carbon the sample was originally made out of. And the only way to find out what kind of carbon the sample is made out of is to actually put it in a reactor and see what it does to it. There is no standard age range for radiocarbon dating, so each sample has its own age, like a penny on a clock.
Radiocarbon dating is used for age dating in geological work because it is faster than traditional sedimentary dating. Radiocarbon dating looks at the amount of carbon the sample was made out of, and the rate at which it decays.
Radiocarbon dating works because it takes a sample of a sample and measures the amount of carbon it is made out of. Since the sample is made out of carbon, it slowly decays over time and a radiocarbon date is made from the amount of time it has been in contact with the sample.
But radiocarbon dating is not always accurate. This is because the amount of carbon in the sample can vary greatly. For example, it can vary between a few parts per thousand in a sample of a rock from a small island to more than one hundred parts per thousand in rocks from a large island. This is because the amount of carbon in the sample is made up of molecules of different shapes and sizes. Carbon is a very hard element to measure accurately.
This is why when we see a small island in a larger body of water, for example, a sample is taken from above the island, and an accurate measurement is made, then the sample is placed in the laboratory for measurement. When a sample is taken from above a large island, though, the sample is thrown out and measured by the scientists themselves. That way, if the sample is small, the measurement may be accurate but it will also be very labor-intensive.
But the problem is that with radiocarbon dating, we have to measure it from the inside out, and that’s going to be very time-consuming because it’s a slow process. Because it’s a very hard element, scientists have to measure it at so many different places in order to get an accurate result. And that’s not something that can be done quickly.
That’s why there are specialized laboratories around the world. Because of this, radiocarbon dating is only often used in the hands of geologists. The reason for this is that radiocarbon dating can tell you about things such as the time that water existed in the earth before it was changed by the impacts of humans. But its not like we can learn about the past by looking at rocks. The earth may have been very different in the past from what we think it is.