Bomb-pulse dating
Definition
Use of the post-1952 atmospheric 14C spike, produced by nuclear weapons testing, to date biological tissues formed since 1950. Because the spike rose and fell at a known rate, measuring 14C in a sample can fix its formation year within a few years for material from the 1960s-1990s period.
Related terms
- AMS radiocarbon dating
- Accelerator Mass Spectrometry measurement of the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in a sample. It requires milligram-scale samples and produces a raw...
- Calibration curve
- A plot of instrument response (peak area, absorbance, intensity) against analyte concentration, built from five to seven standards spanning the expected case...
- Dendrochronology
- The science of dating by tree-ring sequences. Each annual ring encodes the growing conditions of that year; matching ring patterns to a...
- OSL (Optically Stimulated Luminescence)
- A dating method that measures the accumulated radiation dose stored in mineral grains (usually quartz or feldspar) since they were last exposed...
- Terminus post quem (TPQ)
- Latin for 'limit after which.' The date of the youngest datable item in a context sets the earliest possible date for the...
Explained in
- Radiocarbon and Other Dating MethodsUse of the post-1952 atmospheric 14C spike, produced by nuclear weapons testing, to date biological tissues formed since 1950. Because the spike rose and fell...