Calculating The Age
The age of a sample is determined by analysing several minerals within the sample. The 87Sr/86Sr ratio for each sample is plotted against its 87Rb/86Sr ratio on a graph called an isochron. If these form a straight line then the samples are consistent, and the age probably reliable. The slope of the line dictates the age of the sample.
Read more about this topic: Rubidium-strontium Dating
Famous quotes containing the words calculating the, calculating and/or age:
“[The] elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris ... never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)