RE: Naturally-occurring Tritium

[Franz Schoenhofer <schoenho@via.at>]

At 08:36 15.02.2000 -0600, you wrote:
>At 08:11 AM 2/15/00 -0600, you wrote:
>>I have seen a few hydrogeological studies that claim to be able
>>to "date" ground water by the amount of tritium in it.  Is there really an
>>adequate understanding of tritium in the environment to support this?
>
>The math works to our advantage. If the estimate of the environmental
>concentration is wrong by a factor of 8, it causes an error of 3 half lives
>in the age of the groundwater. If the ground water is 1,000 years old, this
>is a small error.


Since the half life of tritium is appr. 12 years, you can imagine, how big
the error would be, when you want to date water, which is 1 000 years old....

Franz


Franz Schoenhofer
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