Fossil fuel emissions could have an adverse affect on the radiocarbon dating method used to determine the age of various artifacts.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest the carbon fossil fuels emit could interfere with the decades-old radiocarbon dating technique.
"If we reduced fossil fuel emissions, it would be good news for radiocarbon dating," study author Heather Graven, a physicist at the Grantham Institute of Climate Change and Environment at Imperial College London, said in a press release. "We can see from atmospheric observations that radiocarbon levels are steadily decreasing. How low they go depends on changes in our fossil fuel emissions."
Radiocarbon dating works by measuring carbon-14, a unique, naturally radioactive version of the element that comes from the atmosphere. Fossil fuels have no carbon-14, so their mixing with the atmosphere confuse the naturally-occurring element.
"As carbon-14 decays over time the fraction will decrease so that's how we use it for dating," Graven told BBC News. "But we can also change this ratio of radioactive carbon to total carbon, if we are adding non-radioactive carbon and that's what's happening with fossil fuels, we get this dilution effect."
Graven estimated that within the coming decades, an item fresh off the shelf will appear to be just as old as one 1,000 years old by radiocarbon dating.
"It really depends on how much emissions increase or decrease over the next century, in terms of how strong this dilution effect gets," she said. "If we reduce emissions rapidly we might stay around a carbon age of 100 years in the atmosphere but if we strongly increase emissions we could get to an age of 1,000 years by 2050 and around 2,000 years by 2100."
