There are many reasons why we need to cut down fossil fuel emissions: pollution, climate extremes, irreparable damage to our natural world. Now there’s another to add to that list: our emissions are messing with radiocarbon dating. A study published in PNAS on Monday claims that increasing fossil fuel emissions will throw off analyses of carbon isotopes, which are used in radiocarbon dating—a method of measuring the age of an object by analysing how much radioactive decay it has undergone, also known simply as carbon dating. Author Heather Graven, a lecturer in climate physics and Earth observation at Imperial College, writes that, “Given current emissions trends, fossil fuel emission-driven artificial ‘aging’ of the atmosphere is likely to occur much faster and with a larger magnitude than previously expected” and that her findings imply “that radiocarbon dating may no longer provide definitive ages for samples up to 2,000 [years] old.”

Read More at  www.motherboard.vice.com