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resistance is futile, you will be assimilated
RE: resistance is futile, you will be assimilated
(June 9, 2025 at 1:03 am)Nay_Sayer Wrote:
(June 8, 2025 at 9:35 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote: feel free to teach me or link to a site that actually teaches it

K-Ar dating
Uranium series dating
Thermoluminescence (TL) Dating
ESR dating
Fission track dating

All non carbon based ways to date fossils.

I'm biased, but U-Pb dating really is the gold standard for most hard rock applications. It's hard to beat zircons with two clocks ticking simultaneously and a third running as backup. K-Ar and Ar-Ar both work reasonably well with a few caveats. Rb-Sr and Sm-Nd can both be useful too, though the latter finds more use in provenance tracing and modelling.

Thermoluminescence and fission track dating both find more use in archeology or timing of uplift and erosion. They're uselul for surface phenomena in the short-term but suffer limitations in the longer term due to low closure temperatures.  I've never done anything with ESR but have heard that it has very low closure temperatures for most minerals and suffers reset even under conditions common to most sedimentary rocks. You can get older ages off of it under the right cicumstances but you have to be much more careful.

There are a slew of other, less common methods including molecular racemization rates, cosmogenic isotope accumulation, and a host of other niche techniques. We can even use tritium to date water. If you get into meteorites you can end up using some of the shorter-lived isotopes that have long since burnt out to trace of processes in the early solar system. At the end of the day it all depends on the question that you're trying to answer and the materials that you're likely to be able to analyze.
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RE: resistance is futile, you will be assimilated - by Paleophyte - June 9, 2025 at 3:51 am

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