Other goods on the ships and the ship itself can sometimes be dated using radiocarbon dating, a powerful technique used by archaeologists to date the age of organic remains. Plants create energy by photosynthesis, which uses the energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide into sugars. As they do this, plants incorporate a quantity of a naturally occurring radioisotope, carbon-14. After plants die, the carbon-14 deteriorates due to radioactive decay. When archaeologists find a shipwreck, they can date the ship’s wood by comparing the remaining carbon-14 fraction in it to that expected from
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