Elephants Killed For Their Ivory Can Have Justice Thanks To Nuclear Bombs?

tusk-fire — Nuclear explosions in the middle of the 20th Century are helping authorities put an end to poaching in an unexpected way. National Geographic

When scientists were testing nuclear bombs during the Cold War, they may not have realized they would be handing authorities a tool to fight elephant poaching in Africa.

Bombs exploded in the open air in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s released a radioactive form of carbon, called carbon-14, that plants absorbed and have retained — and passed to animals that eat those plants, such as elephants, according to National Geographic.

Read: Rare Elephant with Huge Tusks Killed with Poison Arrow

National Geographic explains that after an elephant eats, new growth in its tusk will contain traces of what it has recently eaten. Thus the composition of carbon-14 in ivory could tell authorities when an animal lived and died.

It works because of how carbon-14 decays over time — scientists understand the steady rate at which it disintegrates, so they can measure the element in a tusk to test how long the elephant has been dead.

The amount of time since an elephant’s death is crucial information for anti-poaching efforts because on an international scale elephants have only been protected animals since 1976 and ivory trade has only been banned since 1990. National Geographic says people use this history to skirt around the ban, by falsely claiming that ivory is from before that era; an antique. But now the ivory can be analyzed and the carbon-14 could prove its age to be much younger.

Carbon-14 dating is not a new idea — the planet naturally creates this element and scientists have long used it to estimate age, such as that of dinosaur fossils.

“This is simply another application of a commonly used method,” University of Utah professor Thure Cerling, who developed the method, told National Geographic. “It showed that the ivory in the large seizures was, in fact, from quite recently killed elephants.”