Uranium dating inaccurate

Of all the isotopic dating methods in use today, the uranium-lead method is the oldest and, when done carefully, the most reliable. Unlike any other method, uranium-lead has a natural cross-check built into it that shows when nature has tampered with the evidence. Uranium comes in two common isotopes with atomic weights of and we'll call them U and U. Both are unstable and radioactive, shedding nuclear particles in a cascade that doesn't stop until they become lead Pb. The two cascades are different—U becomes Pb and U becomes Pb.

Since , scientists have reckoned the ages of many old objects by measuring the amounts of radioactive carbon they contain. New research shows, however, that some estimates based on carbon may have erred by thousands of years. It is too soon to know whether the discovery will seriously upset the estimated dates of events like the arrival of human beings in the Western Hemisphere, scientists said. But it is already clear that the carbon method of dating will have to be recalibrated and corrected in some cases. They arrived at this conclusion by comparing age estimates obtained using two different methods - analysis of radioactive carbon in a sample and determination of the ratio of uranium to thorium in the sample.

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Uranium—thorium dating , also called thorium dating , uranium-series disequilibrium dating or uranium-series dating , is a radiometric dating technique established in the s which has been used since the s to determine the age of calcium carbonate materials such as speleothem or coral. Instead, it calculates an age from the degree to which secular equilibrium has been restored between the radioactive isotope thorium and its radioactive parent uranium within a sample. Thorium is not soluble in natural water under conditions found at or near the surface of the earth, so materials grown in or from this water do not usually contain thorium. As time passes after such material has formed, uranium in the sample with a half-life of , years decays to thorium At secular equilibrium, the number of thorium decays per year within a sample is equal to the number of thorium produced, which also equals the number of uranium decays per year in the same sample.