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The decay chain of 238 U is commonly called the "radium series" (sometimes "uranium series"). Beginning with naturally occurring uranium-238, this series includes the following elements: astatine , bismuth , lead , polonium , protactinium , radium , radon , thallium , and thorium .
The three long-lived nuclides are uranium-238 (half-life 4.5 billion years), uranium-235 (half-life 700 million years) and thorium-232 (half-life 14 billion years). The fourth chain has no such long-lasting bottleneck nuclide near the top, so almost all of the nuclides in that chain have long since decayed down to just before the end: bismuth-209.
All three isotopes are radioactive (i.e., they are radioisotopes), and the most abundant and stable is uranium-238, with a half-life of 4.4683 × 10 9 years (about the age of the Earth). Uranium-238 is an alpha emitter, decaying through the 18-member uranium series into lead-206. The decay series of uranium-235 (historically called actino
The existence of two 'parallel' uranium–lead decay routes (238 U to 206 Pb and 235 U to 207 Pb) leads to multiple feasible dating techniques within the overall U–Pb system. The term U–Pb dating normally implies the coupled use of both decay schemes in the 'concordia diagram' (see below).
Uranium-234 is a member of the uranium series and occurs in equilibrium with its progenitor, 238 U; it undergoes alpha decay with a half-life of 245,500 years [7] and decays to lead-206 through a series of relatively short-lived isotopes.
One of its great advantages is that any sample provides two clocks, one based on uranium-235's decay to lead-207 with a half-life of about 700 million years, and one based on uranium-238's decay to lead-206 with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years, providing a built-in crosscheck that allows accurate determination of the age of the sample ...
Uranium–uranium dating is a radiometric dating technique which compares two isotopes of uranium (U) in a sample: uranium-234 (234 U) and uranium-238 (238 U). It is one of several radiometric dating techniques exploiting the uranium radioactive decay series, in which 238 U undergoes 14 alpha and beta decay events on the way to the stable isotope 206 Pb.
Unlike other isotopic dating methods, the "daughter" in fission track dating is an effect in the crystal rather than a daughter isotope.Uranium-238 undergoes spontaneous fission decay at a known rate, and it is the only isotope with a decay rate that is relevant to the significant production of natural fission tracks; other isotopes have fission decay rates too slow to be of consequence.