If this was taken up by local plants, then they would be endemically and systematically low in 14-C and would give anomalously old ages when tested. One might test for this by looking at 14-C in living plants serially further from the bottom of glaciers.

It might even be true that the atomsphere immediately around melt streams emerging from glaciers might be low in 14-C CO2 because of the equilibrium between the local atmospheric CO2 and the 14-C depleted dissolved CO2 and bicarbonate in the melt waters. If true, that would also facilitate low 14-C plants around glacier margins.

Of course, the older the glacier, the more 14-C depleted the emerging melt water, and the more anomalously old-seeming the local plants.

The same melt-percolation process may explain the low 14-C in the waters around Antractica and would predict 14-C depleted waters around Greenland, too.

I read about Lichenometric-dating curves.
As in this abstract here:

“Little Ice Age’ glacier variations in Jotunheimen, southern Norway: a study in regionally controlled lichenometric dating of recessional moraines with implications for climate and lichen growth rates

http://tinyurl.com/hfwud

lichen is a really interesting organism/plant whatever it is!

A really strange report also turned up about mummified seals in Victoria Land, Antarctica, that dated out to between 615 through 4,600 years,[4] even though the frozen tissues could not have survived that long. The author mentioned that, “antarctic sea water has significantly lower carbon-14 activity than accepted as the world standard. Therefore, radiocarbon dating of marine organisms yields apparent dates that are older than true ages, but by an unknown and possibly variable amount.“, and went on to mention that, “A seal freshly killed at McMurdo had an apparent age of 1,300 years.”

[1] M. L. Keith and G. M. Anderson (1963) “Radiocarbon Dating: Fictitious Results with Mollusc Shells” Science 141, 634-636.
[2] M. Rubin and D. W. Taylor (1963) Radiocarbon Activity of Shells from Living Clams and Snails” Science 141, 637.
[3] A. C. Riggs (1984) “Major Carbon-14 Deficiency in Modern Snail Shells from Southern Nevada Springs” Science 224, 58-61.
[4] W. Dort, Jr. (1971) “Mummified seals of southern Victoria Land” Antarctic Journal VI(5) September-October 1971, pp. 210-211.

One wonders about the generality of regional deficiencies of 14-C, if one such can occur in a large-scale stirred body of water like the antarctic sea; namely, whether adventitious regional deficiencies can occur or have occurred elsewhere for region-specific reasons, which would cause later dating to be experimentally correct but physically wrong. Perhaps one could calibrate a soil column to find out.

The article about the seals wandered into strange territory, by the way, discussing “numerous seal-bodies” of seal pups that apparently had wandered far inland, into the dry valleys of Victoria Land, where they froze to death and were then slowly ablated away by ice and sand during wind storms. The journal-cover featured a picture of one such seal, half gone on a pedestal of wind-sculpted, body-fluid-containing ice. It was frozen in a rear-body up-turned curve, and was fully 60 km from McMurdo sound. Some seals had managed to climb 1200 meter scarps! The mind boggles at imagining that journey.

#6 – the ability to clone plants makes aging individual stems without annual rings somewhat pointless. I once saw the rather rare flowering of a night-blooming Cereus cutting that came from an original plant that was living over 100 years ago. The cutting only had been growing on its own for a decade or so and I don’t know how many “generations” removed from the original. Realize however that the carbon in the young cutting was incorporated recently and very little if any of the original plant’s carbon still resided in it.

Spoor: tracks, droppings from a wild animal.

Spore: reproductive body produced by mosses

So, I wonder does how a plant propagates or if a species has the ability to lie dormant, factor in or not in the carbon dating of plants? (ex: do spoors survive in ice?) I realize the timespans are huge and this might be a ridiculous thought on my part. I would think, no it doesn’t, because the carbon signature is made during it’s growing into a full plant. I just keep thinking about spoors rolling around in a glaciers and moving ice waiting to thaw out.