Climate science required the invention and mastery of many difficult techniques.
After a creature's death the isotope would slowly decay away over millennia at a fixed rate.
Thus the less of it that remained in an object, in proportion to normal carbon, the older the object was.
Also, the Sun’s own magnetic field varies with the cycle, and that could change the way cosmic particles bombarded the Earth.
In 1961, Minze Stuiver suggested that longer-term solar variations might account for the inconsistent carbon-14 dates. Libby, for one, cast doubt on the idea, so subversive of the many dates his team had supposedly established with high accuracy.(9) Suess and Stuiver finally pinned down the answer in 1965 by analyzing hundreds of wood samples dated from tree rings.
For example, Hans Suess relied on a variety of helpers to collect fragments of century-old trees from various corners of North America.