# Radiocarbon in Coal?

**URL:** <https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/radiocarbon-in-coal/13931>\
**Category:** Conversation\
**Tags:** Science\
**Created:** [July 1, 2021, 11:36pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/radiocarbon-in-coal/13931 "2021-07-01T23:36:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![Rumraket](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/rumraket/32/9328_2.png) [@Rumraket](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Rumraket)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2021, 9:45pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/radiocarbon-in-coal/13931/6 "2021-07-02T21:45:17Z")

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I’m neither a geologist nor a physicist, so I can’t speak to the relevance of this phenomenon in explaining C14 contents in coal. But there has been studies done that show there is non-neglible underground neutron radiation from heavy elements naturally found in Earth’s crust, that result in measurable C14 levels in petroleum. I wrote a post about this here about 2 years ago when a similar topic was discussed:

> [@Snelling: Recent Carbon Dates for Cretaceous Wood](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/snelling-recent-carbon-dates-for-cretaceous-wood/6728/10):
>
> Of course he’s likely to be quite wrong about that, no matter how strongly he insists this isn’t the case. But even were it the case, in situ C14 generation is a known fact. It has been shown that even several hundred million year old samples contain non-neglible amounts of intrinsic C14. That C14, however, turns out to be continously generated by (among other things) neutron radiation from nearby radioactive elements in the rocklayers between which the carbon of interest(be it coal, diamond, natural gas, tars, crude oil or whatever) is found. It was something of a mystery for a time why such old carbon sources contained C14 as it was thought (correctly) that the cosmic radiation responsible for generating atmospheric C14 could not penetrate the crust to the depths in which coal, oil, diamond and so on is found. However, in calculating the expected C14 contents of ground fossil hydrocarbons, geologists had apparently neglected to consider intrinsic neutron radiation generated by the…

It seems to me if underground neutron radiation can generate measurable amounts of C14 in petroleum, it can do so in coal.

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