Is Radioactive Carbon Dating Accurate - Radioactive Decay and Half-Life : The halflife of carbon 14 is 5730 ± 30 years, and the method of dating lies in trying to determine how much carbon 14 (the radioactive isotope of carbon) is present in the artifact and comparing it to levels currently present in the atmosphere.
This method is useful for igneous and metamorphic rocks, which cannot be dated by the stratigraphic correlation method used fo...