So that is your strategy? Just ignore the explanations already posted and repeat your anti-radiometrics talking-points sheet? Face-palm. Not a good way to intelligently deal with the massive evidence.
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Iâd just like to reiterate this. @LarryI, if someone refutes something you said, you need to address the points that they made in response to you. Just repeating the same thing as you said before, without bringing anything new to the table, is a waste of everybodyâs time.
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Yes. @Larryl, when you robotically repeat your talking pointsâoblivious to the evidence which destroys themâyou remind us that your defiance of radiometric science has nothing to do with the evidence. As with so many origins-ministries entrepreneurs who promote the silly objections you recite, you assume that the debate is about who can convince the masses with rhetoric, not the scientific evidence.
I remember a Chick Tract that was popular when I was still involved in âcreation scienceâ circles. It claimed that Carbon-14 radiometric dating was âobviously worthlessâ because a living clam was tested and âIt was dated at 12,000 years old!â Scientists have known for a very long time that mollusk shells are made from the carbonates in their environmentâso that Carbon-14 dating is actually analyzing those building-block carbonate minerals which mollusks used to build their exoskeletons. Scientists figured this out long ago, so the Chick Tract argument only sounds convincing to those who are ignorant of the science.
Indeed, your entire list of alleged âcounter-examplesâ illustrates well why non-scientists fall prey to Dunning-Kruger Effect types of errors in thinking.
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As with any analysis, referring to outliers and ignoring the evidence in favor gives a false impression. Hereâs an image from an earlier discussion over the same issue. You can clearly see that the island chains, Hawaii Islands, Hawaii Seamounts, Emperor Seamounts, which extend from Hawaii Island nearly to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, are a perfect example of how radiometric dating does work. The Pacific Plate is measured moving at about 8 cm per year to the north and west. Using that speed as an average, the distance-dates have been calculated (time taken to move the distance from the volcanic hot spot to the present location at the current rate) and the correlate perfectly with the radiometric dates of the islands (or seamounts).
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@AllenWitmerMiller and @Dan_Eastwood and, of course, @LarryI :::
Maybe someone could point out to @LarryI what results are obtained when carbon dating is done on an organic object that is too old to be within scope for carbon dating?
Iâm certainly no expert on radiometrics but it is my understanding that the results would be basically meaningless because whatever trace amounts of carbon-14 would be detectedâif even in the range of the lab equipmentâs ability to accurately measure the amountâcould be from various other sources. The sample could be contaminated by human handling, for example. Or the carbon-14 could be due to decay-chain products of other adjacent materials. (That is, carbon-14 can come from heavy elements decaying into lighter elements. I donât know, perhaps it is also possible under some conditions for carbon-12 to gain some neutrons from nearby radioactive materials? That seems much less likely to meâat least in terms of significant carbon-14 quantitiesâbut Iâm not a physicist. Fun topic, however.)
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So why didnât it work when it was tested in these instances? What is your explanation?
Rocks that were created since the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens have been dated to be 2.8 billion years old.
There is a Sunset Crater in Arizona. Scientists have used radiometric dating (Potassium / Argon the rocks from the crater there and estimated the rocks to be more than 200,000 years old. It was formed in 1065. Indian records have confirmed the date.
Lava flow deposits in New Zealand, at Mt. Ngaurhoe were tested Potassium - Argon isotope radiometric to be at least 275,000 years old. Lava flows from the mountain happened in 1949, 1954 and 1975.
In Hawaii, the Hualalai volcano erupted with basalt lava in 1800 and 1801, and more recently, Mauna Loa erupted in 1984. Rocks from this lava flow were tested with Potassium / Argon to be 1.4 million to 22 million years old.
Here is another one from Sicily: Rocks from Mt. Etna were tested to be from 140,000 - 350,000 years old. In reality, rocks from the lava date from 1972.
True. But the problem is that the results of radiometric dating are not consistently accurate. The meteor came from outer space. We are assuming that we know everything about the rock that there is to know so that we can test it accurately. The problem is that in many radiometric dating tests, it has shown to be flawed in a very big way. But again, making the assumption that everything outside the earth was exactly as we can predict it here on earth, using the measurements that we have does not account for changes in the universe that were necessary to create or form it in the first place.
No they werenât. It is well known the YECs who submitted those samples knew they contained xenoliths - much older basalts from older eruptions mixed in with the current lava flows. Dating the mixture will give the dates of the older xenoliths. This is true of all the other volcanic eruptions youâre regurgitating from your YEC source. If you want to date a specific eruption using radiometric dating of the ejecta you must be very careful to get new uncontaminated samples.
This is a classic example of lying by omission common on YEC websites.
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So that means that there are no examples of radiometric dating that are flawed? I listed a number of other examples. What are your explanations for those tests?
Of course there are some samples which were contaminated and gave wrong dates. Scientists looking for accurate dates, probably 99,9% of all testing done, take great care to ensure samples are uncontaminated. They also generally test dozens of samples from each site again to enure a correct dating. Thatâs opposed to the handful of YEC charlatans deliberately offering up contaminated samples looking for erroneous dates.
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No, but it does mean that YECs greatly exaggerate the extent and significance of the flaws. Itâs one thing to demonstrate that some radiometric methods work on some minerals but not on others. Itâs a completely different matter to demonstrate that all radiometric methods consistently over-report ages by factors of up to a million.
This is the point that I made in my post that I linked to in response 100 above.
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@larryl
Converging results from multioke methods is the best practice in science.
You should read up on it!
This has been sufficiently answered in this thread⌠there are also numerous pages that describe that what you are saying is not the case. Here, for one, and there are many others. While radiometric dating is not perfect, nothing is. The fact, though, is that there are many instances (like that of the Hawaiian Islands > Emperor Seamounts) where the radiometric date is independently correlated to an entirely different metric (such as distance over time.)
Even though there are some outliers and method misapplications that will occur now and again, this is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. To do so would be like being told that smoking will kill you and not listening to me because your Aunt Becky smoked and she lived to be 106. Radiometric dating works. Smoking kills.
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The estimates from radiometric dating are based on a ratio of decay products to the remaining amount of the original radioisotope. As the amount of original material approaches zero, so does the denominator of the ratio and the estimates become increasingly inaccurate (because we can barely detect the isotope over background radiation levels). For C-14 the normal limit is around 40,000 years. Under special circumstances, where it is possible to obtain very clean samples that can be extended to ~70,000. C-14 dating also requires a sample of biological material - living things capture C-14 from the atmosphere as the grow and live. We canât apply this method to rocks.
When we find objects we think might older than the limits of C-14 dating, then we need to look at other methods to confirm this. Objects of any age may be contaminated with modern C-14, so itâs important of obtain a clean sample (there is a lot of expertise in doing this properly).
What instances? Unless you provide some citation to the source of these claims, there is no way to answer the question. We canât even confirm these claims arenât complete fabrications, to which there is no point in answering at all. Most likely your claims are sourced from bad data, contaminated samples, methods improperly applied, and wishful thinking. Bring us some documentation of these claims, such as journal articles that include a description of methods or even the actual lab results (sometimes included as supplementary materials). Substantiate your claim first, there is no particular reason to take you seriously otherwise.
The reason itâs not necessary to take you seriously, is we have enormous evidence that radioactive decay happens as described by the laws of physics. If there were a problem with our understanding of physics, THAT SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS. Nuclear reactors wouldnât work (or nuclear bombs), any technology that uses radio active materials wouldnât work either - gauging sensors, medical devices/tests/treatments, radium clock faces, sterilization chambers, and more
And now @LarryI, itâs your turn! If these radiometric methods are wrong, and the Earth is much younger than we think it is, then why do we see so much confirmatory evidence from multiple fields of science? (geology, astronomy, paleontology, archeology, etcâŚ)
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If you can reduce contamination and other background contributions sufficiently at some point the non-atmospheric contributions to sample C-14 concentrations will come into play, which will place a theoretical limit on C-14 dating.
Cluster decay of various isotopes of Francium, Radium and Actinium produces C-14, so the presence of Thorium and Uranium in the material sample leads to a small equilibrium C-14 concentation.
Both coal and diamond contain significant amounts of Nitrogen. This means that the nucleon exchange reaction N-14(n,p)C-14 can produce C-14. (Spontaneous fission is a source of neutrons, as is spallation by high energy cosmic radiation.)
There is also neutron absorption by C-13, and even antineutrino driven conversion (an N-14 nucleus absorbs an anti-neutrino and emits a positron) and other processes.
Some C-14 generating processes operate in the upper atmosphere. Elsewhere theyâre sufficiently rare, relatively, that C-14 dating is a workable technique. Another dating technique that uses the decay of an atmospherically produced cosmogenic nuclide is the dating of groundwater by the amount of Argon-39. It might be the only other one - the unstable isotopes of nitrogen, oxygen and neon are much too short lived to be useful.
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These are interesting; I have wondered about terrestrial generation of C-14, but have not found much information. Do you have any good references you could pass on?
Not offhand. Wikipedia has a decent article on cluster decay. (And has good coverage on nuclear processes in general.) Otherwise put search terms into Google Scholar.
Iâm not aware of anyone addressing crustal C-14 production in particular.
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