Surface exposure dating is used to date glacial advances and retreats, erosion history, lava flows, meteorite impacts, rock slides, fault scarps, cave development, and other geological events.
The cumulative flux of cosmic rays at a particular location can be affected by several factors, including elevation, geomagnetic latitude, the varying intensity of the Earth's magnetic field, solar winds, and atmospheric shielding due to air pressure variations.
The excess relative to natural abundance of cosmogenic nuclides in a rock sample is usually measured by means of accelerator mass spectrometry.
These equations can be combined to give the total concentration of cosmogenic radionuclides in a sample as a function of age.
As oxygen-16 is also common in the atmosphere, the contribution to the beryllium-10 concentration from material deposited rather than created in situ must be taken into account.
Because there are two radionuclides decaying, the ratio of concentrations of these two nuclides can be used without any other knowledge to determine an age at which the sample was buried past the production depth (typically 2–10 meters).