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Nuke Tests Offer a Chance to Bust Ivory Dealers

New technique could put an end to fake "pre-ban" ivory.
Photo: NonProfitOrgs

Those Cold War-era nuclear bomb tests weren't all bad—radiation left over in the atmosphere is giving researchers a new tool to fight elephant poaching.

Because an elephant's tusk absorbs radioactive carbon deposited in the air by those tests, researchers are able to test ivory to determine when the elephant was killed. Each year, the amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere declines slightly, with trace amounts being absorbed by an elephant's tusk.

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That means scientists can compare the amount of radiocarbon seen in a tusk with atmospheric levels to determine a tusk's age. The method has been tested successfully, with results published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The process works on elephants poached between 1955 and today, and will continue working until radiocarbon reaches trace levels in the atmosphere about 15 years from now.

Dating ivory is important, because the 1989 CITES trade ban allows dealers to continue selling "pre-ban" ivory from elephants killed prior to the ban.

That means in practice, the ban has had little effect: Until now, determining the age of ivory has been practically impossible, allowing dealers in China and Asia to simply pass off new ivory as pre-ban ivory, especially if they artificially weather it to make ivory look older than it really is. In fact, the number of elephants poached each year is increasing, and the price of ivory has hit more than $1,000 per pound.

Until now, there has been virtually no reliable way of tracking ivory as it's trafficked: Authorities have had to rely on busting traffickers moving whole tusks as ivory comes into a country or risk having them turned into carved art or another ridiculous piece, at which point dealers can sell it with little fear of retribution.

"We've developed a tool that allows us to determine the age of a tusk or piece of ivory, and this tells us whether it was acquired legally," Kevin Uno, a Columbia University researcher who worked on the study, said. "Our dating method is affordable for government and law enforcement agencies and can help tackle the poaching and illegal trade crises."

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A 2007 report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences detailed ways that authorities could use DNA testing to trace ivory to the elephants' country of origin, which is helpful, but DNA testing wasn't able to tell when an elephant was killed, allowing dealers to continue playing dumb.

"It can reliably tell us, is it legal ivory or not?," Sam Wasser, who worked on the PNAS DNA study, said.

Carbon dating is also more readily done than genetic testing (though the advances in that field have driven costs way down): You can get something carbon dated for a couple hundred bucks in labs all around the world.

In the case of big busts, such as a September 2011 one in Malaysia that netted more than two tons of elephant tusks, carbon dating and genetic testing can be used in concert to determine where and when an elephant was killed. That makes arresting the trader easier and at least gives authorities a fighting chance of eventually tracking down the poachers themselves.

Here's some more good news: Uno is hopeful that the method can also be applied to rhinos, which are also being killed in record numbers.