Geologists often need to know the age of material that they find. They use absolute dating methods, sometimes called numerical dating, to give rocks an actual date, or date range, in number of years. This is different to relative dating, which only puts geological events in time order.
Comparing radiocarbon dating methods
Dr Christine Prior is Team Leader of the Rafter Radiocarbon Laboratory at GNS Science. In this video, she compares conventional and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating. AMS is faster and needs a much smaller sample, but is more expensive. Also shown are views of bone preparation at the Waikato Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory.
