Rock and fossils containing carbon occur in abundance throughout the earth's strata. Once living organisms now buried in these strata incorporated some carbon-14 within themselves while they were alive. For earth materials classified as ancient, all of this original C-14 content should be completely decayed away. For example, after ten half-lives of decay, any radioactive material has only 0.1 percent remaining of its original content. This small percentage results from multiplying the fraction... read more
