ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Impact of fossil fuel emissions on atmospheric radiocarbon and various applications of radiocarbon over this century.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 156 citations in OpenAlex.
- Minimal impact of recent decline in CCommunications earth & environment · 2026Article
- Quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment plants: A critical review.Environmental science and ecotechnology · 2025Review
- Ecosystem and soil respiration radiocarbon detects old carbon release as a fingerprint of warming and permafrost destabilization with climate change.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2023Article
- Making the case for an International Decade of Radiocarbon.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2023Review
- Sub-annual bomb radiocarbon records from trees in northern Israel.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Atmospheric Black Carbon Loadings and Sources over Eastern Sub-Saharan Africa Are Governed by the Regional Savanna Fires.Environmental science & technology · 2022Article
- Observations of greenhouse gases as climate indicators.Climatic change · 2021Article
- Changes to Carbon Isotopes in Atmospheric COGlobal biogeochemical cycles · 2020Article
- DNA preserved in jetsam whale ambergris.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Detection of Fossil and Biogenic Methane at Regional Scales Using Atmospheric Radiocarbon.Earth's future · 2019Article
- Article
- Global Peak in Atmospheric Radiocarbon Provides a Potential Definition for the Onset of the Anthropocene Epoch in 1965.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Reactive Neuroblastosis in Huntington's Disease: A Putative Therapeutic Target for Striatal Regeneration in the Adult Brain.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2018Article
- Radiocarbon analysis reveals expanded diet breadth associates with the invasion of a predatory ant.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Tracing Aquatic Priming Effect During Microbial Decomposition of Terrestrial Dissolved Organic Carbon in Chemostat Experiments.Microbial ecology · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Radiocarbon analyses are commonly used in a broad range of fields, including earth science, archaeology, forgery detection, isotope forensics, and physiology. Many applications are sensitive to the radiocarbon ((14)C) content of atmospheric CO2, which has varied since 1890 as a result of nuclear weapons testing, fossil fuel emissions, and CO2 cycling between atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial carbon reservoirs. Over this century, the ratio (14)C/C in atmospheric CO2 (Δ(14)CO2) will be determined by the amount of fossil fuel combustion, which decreases Δ(14)CO2 because fossil fuels have lost all (14)C from radioactive decay. Simulations of Δ(14)CO2 using the emission scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report, the Representative Concentration Pathways, indicate that ambitious emission reductions could sustain Δ(14)CO2 near the preindustrial level of 0‰ through 2100, whereas "business-as-usual" emissions will reduce Δ(14)CO2 to -250‰, equivalent to the depletion expected from over 2,000 y of radioactive decay. Given current emissions trends, fossil fuel emission-driven artificial "aging" of the atmosphere is likely to occur much faster and with a larger magnitude than previously expected. This finding has strong and as yet unrecognized implications for many applications of radiocarbon in various fields, and it implies that radiocarbon dating may no longer provide definitive ages for samples up to 2,000 y old.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.