Can you carbon date a living thing?

Carbon dating is used to work out the age of organic material — in effect, any living thing. As a rule, carbon dates are younger than calendar dates: a bone carbon-dated to 10,000 years is around 11,000 years old, and 20,000 carbon years roughly equates to 24,000 calendar years.

Can you carbon date water?

Radiocarbon dating of recent water samples, aquatic plants, and animals, shows that age differences of up to 2000 14C years can occur within one river. The freshwater reservoir effect has also implications for radiocarbon dating of Mesolithic pottery from inland sites of the Ertebølle culture in Northern Germany.

What happens to the carbon 12 atoms while the carbon-14 atoms are decaying?

Carbon-12 atoms have stable nuclei because of the 1:1 ratio of protons and neutrons. Carbon-14 atoms have nuclei which are unstable. C-14 atoms will undergo alpha decay and produce atoms of N-14.