For example, in 1991, two hikers discovered a mummified man, preserved for centuries in the ice on an alpine mountain.
This is called Therefore the characteristic property of the radioisotope, namely its radioactivity can act as a tag or label, which permits the fate of the element or its compound containing this element to be traced through a series of chemical or physical changes.
Some of the application of tracer techniques are discussed below.
There is a small amount of radioactive carbon-14 in all living organisms because it enters the food chain.
Once an organism dies, it stops taking in carbon-14.
The half-life of an isotope like C14 is the time it takes for half of it to decay away: in C14, every 5,730 years, half of it is gone.
So, if you measure the amount of C14 in a dead organism, you can figure out how long ago it stopped exchanging carbon with its atmosphere.Atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons are called isotopes. Most carbon on Earth exists as the very stable isotope carbon-12, with a very small amount as carbon-13.Here’s an example using the simplest atom, hydrogen. Carbon-14 is an unstable isotope of carbon that will eventually decay at a known rate to become carbon-12.One of the interesting applications of radioactive decay is the technique of radioactive dating.Radioactive dating allows the estimation of the age of any object which was alive once, using the natural radioactivity of .Radiocarbon dating was invented in the 1950s by the American chemist Willard F.