Carbon dating has once again taken center stage in the continuing debate around the reported discovery of a "Shivling" behind the walls of Varanasi's Gyanvapi mosque.
Four of the five Hindu petitioners filed a lawsuit demanding the object's carbon dating to establish its age after a court-ordered videography inspection proved its existence in the mosque. However, the Varanasi district court dismissed this plea on Friday.
A simple method used by archaeologists to determine the age of organic materials up to 50,000 years old is carbon dating, sometimes known as radiocarbon dating. This approach has aided historians in learning about ancient civilizations, planetary changes, and climatic variations.
The principle behind radiocarbon dating is concise: all living organisms absorb carbon from their environment, including a small amount of carbon-14, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of carbon. This absorption mechanism is aided by natural phenomena like respiration and photosynthesis.
The plant or animal stops absorbing when it dies, however, the radioactive carbon that has collected keeps on decaying steadily. According to a study that was published in the journal Nature, determining the amount left over can provide an estimation of how long something has been dead.
Carbon dating is a common technique for determining the age of organic materials or objects that were once alive. Carbon exists in a variety of forms in all living things. The carbon isotope Carbon-14 (C-14), which has an atomic mass of 14, is radioactive and decays at a predictable rate, forming the basis for the dating method.?
The process is as follows:
C-12 is the most prevalent form of carbon in the atmosphere. There is also a tiny amount of C-14. In the atmosphere, the ratio of C-12 to C-14 is almost constant and well-known.
Animals mostly obtain carbon through food, whereas plants do so through photosynthesis. Due to the fact that plants and animals obtain their carbon from the environment, they also receive C-12 and C-14 in an approximately equivalent ratio to what is present in the atmosphere.
Their interaction with the environment ends when they pass away. The radioactive element C-14 has a half-life of approximately 5,730 years, whereas C-12 is stable. After an organism dies, its remains can be examined for changes in the ratio of C-12 to C-14, which can be used to estimate the approximate time of death.
Carbon dating has a high degree of effectiveness, however, it is not always appropriate. Rocks and other non-living objects such as fossils cannot be dated using this method.
Additionally, carbon dating cannot determine the age of anything older than 40,000¨C50,000 years. This is due to the fact that the amount of C-14 becomes incredibly minuscule and nearly undetectable after 8¨C10 cycles of half-lives.
However, there are additional techniques for determining the age of inanimate objects, many of which share carbon dating's fundamental assumptions. As a result, the basis for the dating method is no longer carbon but rather the decay of any other radioactive elements that may be present in the material.
There are additional techniques for figuring out how long something has been exposed to sunlight. These employ many methodologies, but they all have a common basis in radioactive decay. They are especially helpful for researching buried objects or topological changes. Cosmogenic nuclide dating, or CRN, is the most popular method and is frequently used to determine the age of ice cores in polar locations.
Carbon dating can also be applied indirectly in some circumstances.
The use of carbon dating to establish that the object, which is asserted as a "shivling," predates the mosque's construction in 1669 is still contested.
The Varanasi district court ruled that the place where the claimed "Shivling" was discovered must be sealed in order to prevent a "scientific investigation" of the artefact.
Earlier, the Gyanvapi Mosque Committee had also raised objections to the investigation.
Although there are other techniques that can be used to estimate the age of inanimate objects, such as looking for organic materials trapped beneath the buildings, such a move is still not practical because it would mean destroying and uprooting the entire site, which is neither desirable nor feasible.