Radiometric Dating Research Paper

Index:
Introduction.......................................................................page 1
What is radiometric dating? ............................................page 2
Theory on which it is based..............................................page 2
How does radiometric dating work.................................page 3
How accurate is it..............................................................page 4
Problems and shortcomings of radiometric dating.........page 5
Conclusion.........................................................................page 6
Bibliography.......................................................................page 7

Introduction:
Radiometric dating is the method used to determine the age of material. Rocks for example are made up of elements and some of these elements are unstable and will decay to form a different element over time, this is called radiometric decay. Scientists use a spectrometer to determine the amount of each parent and daughter isotope in the material. By finding these values they work out how old the rock or object is. Radiometric dating is a very accurate way to date the age of an object if the object was in a
The rate of radioactive decay was faster when the Earth was young. Another problem is that in order for radiometric dating to work you need to know how much of the parent and daughter isotopes were present when the decaying started. The main problem of radiometric dating is that the material must be in an isolated system (no loss or gain of parent or daughter isotope) which over many years would be very unlikely. There are no closed systems where the material will not interact with anything other elements for millions of years. There are many examples of when radiometric dating was inaccurate for example lava flow rocks that were of a known recent age have been incorrectly dated by radiometric