Cold War explosions are now being used as now a forensic tool in a technique called "bomb-curve dating," giving new insight to elephant poachers and the illegal trade of ivory, according to reports.
There was an international ban placed in 1989 on ivory sales, but elephant poaching is still big business. According to National Geographic, an estimated 30,000 African elephants were killed for their tusks last year. The elephant ivory is reportedly traded in China and the Far East, where it can be sold for $1,300 a pound.
However, scientists have developed a technique that may help crack down on the illegal sales of tusks.
"A new ivory-dating technique, described this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relies on radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere during atom bomb tests in the 1950s and '60s," the National Geographic reported. "A ban on aboveground nuclear testing went into effect in October 1963."
The technique is known as bomb-curve dating, and it gives scientists a way to detect "radioactive isotopes" reportedly within ivory or tusks. Bomb-curve dating helps determine to within a year the time the elephant died or was killed, according to National Geographic.
The bomb curve reportedly looks for the presence of the heavily radioactive isotope carbon-14 in the atmosphere since the 1950s. National Geographic reported that level of this particular isotope has doubled during the years of aboveground nuclear testing, from 1952 to 1963.
Scientists have been charting the presence of carbon-14 since the mid-1950s.
"This will tell us the age of the piece and thus whether or not it was acquired legally," study leader Kevin Uno, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory told National Geographic.
"It is a simple, accurate, and affordable test and will make it far easier to enforce the ivory ban."
For more information about bomb-curve dating, click here.
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