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why are scientists unsatisfied with using one type of element to determine the age of a rock?

Sagot :

Answer:

Different elements have different half lives, which means that certain elements are only useful for determining the age of a rock up to a certain age.  Carbon-14, for example, is great for dating archeological finds as old as 50,000 years.  But that's the limit of its usefulness.  I would not be useful for dating dinosaur bones.  For that you would need an element with a much longer half life, such as Uranium-238, which has a half life of more than a million years.