15.14: Understanding Earth's History- Challenge 3

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1. The distinctive patterns of tree rings, ice cores, and ___ can be used to determine the time they were formed.: varves

2. The counting of ___ layers is one of the methods of ice core dating.: dust-snow

3. ___ analysis yields clues about how changes in the concentration of atmospheric gases have influenced Earth's climate over time.: Ice core

4. If two half-lives have passed, ___ percent of the parent isotope remains.: 25

5. Radioactive decay of an isotope leads to the formation of a ___ product.: stable daughter

6. ___ discovered the spontaneous emission of particles that they called "radioactivity.": Pierre and Marie Curie

7. When an organism dies, carbon-14 decays to stable nitrogen-14 by releasing a ___.: beta particle

8. Carbon dating measures when an organism died because only then does ___.: carbon-14 decay into nitrogen-14

9. Carbon-14 dating is used for dating human remains and artifacts because ___.: carbon-14 has a relatively short half-life and early human fossils and materials often contain carbon

10. ___ is the most useful technique for dating Earth's matter and coming up with a quantitative age for the planet.: Radiometric dating

11. ___ determines the age of an object based on the concentration of a particular radioactive isotope contained within the object.: Radiometric dating

12. Earth is ___ years old.: 4.6 billion