What is The reason at which carbon dating works?

Answer:Every 5,730 years, the radioactivity of carbon-14 decays by half. That half-life is critical to radiocarbon dating. Since carbon-12 doesn't decay, it's a good benchmark against which to measure carbon-14's inevitable demise. The less radioactivity a carbon-14 isotope emits, the older it is.Explanation:The carbon-14 decays with its half-life of 5,700 years, while the amount of carbon-12 remains constant in the sample. By looking at the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in the sample and comparing it to the ratio in a living organism, it is possible to determine the age of a formerly living thing fairly precisely.Basic Principles of Carbon DatingRadiocarbon (carbon 14) is an isotope of the element carbon that is unstable and weakly radioactive. The stable isotopes are carbon 12 and carbon 13.Carbon 14 is continually being formed in the upper atmosphere by the effect of cosmic ray neutrons on nitrogen 14 atoms. It is rapidly oxidized in the air to form carbon dioxide and enters the global carbon cycle.Plants and animals assimilate carbon 14 from carbon dioxide throughout their lifetimes. When they die, they stop exchanging carbon with the biosphere and their carbon 14 content then starts to decrease at a rate determined by the law of radioactive decay.Radiocarbon dating is essentially a method designed to measure residual radioactivity.

Carbon dating works because all biotic factors absorb carbon from their surroundings. Although the absorption comes to an end at the death of the living organism, the carbon continues to decay. This tells scientists an approximation of when the organism died. What is carbon dating?Carbon dating is the process in which (mainly) petrologists use the presence of carbon in an organism to date back to its lifespan and identify when it died off. Because everything that has life absorbs carbon, we are sure carbon dating is an accurate method for determining how long the matter lived.