meta-roj

This site is currently broken

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

the upside of nuclear testing

back in 1989, the ivory trade was officially (though not practically) shut down by international agreement. since then it’s been a bit of a contentious issue.

what makes this a science story and not an endagered-species story or an economics story, is that scientist thinks he has the technology to reopen the ivory trade, on more-acceptable terms.

Nuclear physicist Elias Sideras-Haddad says he can determine when an elephant died as well as its age by a new carbon-dating technique applied to the tusks — a process made possible by the above-ground nuclear tests of the past.

the reuters article mentions a presentation from two years ago in japan… there’s a faint echo of that here [pdf] – it was called “Dating studies of elephant tusks from the Kruger National Park South Africa using accelerator based mass spectrometry.”

that’s just not terribly satisfying, but the paper [pdf, october 3, 2002] itself is also available from lawrence livermore national labs. sadly, it’s a pretty bad scan-based document as opposed to real text, so it’s not much fun to read.

given the bush administration’s concept of science, this may just come back as a good reason to build those baby nukes and get out of the test-ban treaty. there seems to be more solid science behind this than behind, for example, the missile-defense plan…. and you can spin it as an economic support plan that lets those poor african countries pay back their debts.

posted by roj at 2:05 am