Sal seems to have lost all interest in his own geology thread. That always happens when people show him physical features of the planet he can’t hand-wave away with his YEC Flood claims. 
1 Like
Radiometric dating is a science as well as an applied technology which is in routine daily use for working commercial and geological research. This has been going on for decades, with progressive precision, and by now the data set is massive. This information has utility because radiometric dating works, and the reason it works because the laws of physics demand that it does. Anomalous results also happen, and likewise, they also happen for physical reasons. If the sample is inappropriate, the same laws of physics would predict a failure to obtain a reliable date, and that’s what happens. If the sample is contaminated or mishandled, or the machine is not properly calibrated, likewise a bad result is guaranteed. When you get an unexpected result, you find the reason for the failure, and there will be one as sure as why your car is not starting. You do not dismiss the whole established enterprise. It is not worldview, or attitude, it is physics.
A few spurious results do invalidate the vast repository of solid dating any more than they invalidate the underlying physics. Just because some jack of all trades cannot build a square bookcase does not mean shaker furniture doesn’t exist. Skill, technique, and expertise matter, but to suggest that the data set is some sort of random scattershot, and scientists are just cherry picking the results they prefer, is just nonsense. You would simply not observe the regularity of data that is there were the technique unreliable, unless you indulge a vision of geochonologists as mindless conspiracy zombies.
Whatever the merits of racemization dating, that is nothing like radiometric dating, which has been subject to reproducible results by dozens of labs and commercially exploited, and there is nothing in common in terms of either principle or scale of application. It is a fantasy to expect radiometric dating to somehow just go away in ten years - that is not going to happen.
Sal’s observed events being dated to hundreds of millions of years account for zero % of the data, because no such thing happened.
Even the cases where YECs collected lava containing fragments of unmelted rock debris and dated it using inapplicable techniques only produced spurious ages of a couple of million years, not hundreds of millions.
1 Like
Yes, I’m aware of the study in question. That was Steve Austin’s Mount St Helen’s dacite. Fresh lava from the aforementioned 1980 eruption sent to a radiometric lab that actually said on its website that it couldn’t date samples under 2 million years, and that anything under 5 million years would incur a 50% surcharge. Then when they get a smattering of results of less than 2 million years from one method, they start hawking that as evidence that all radiometric methods are so out of whack right across the board that they consistently fail to tell the difference between thousands and billions.
And then the young earth rumour mill gets to work and somehow transmogrifies “less than two million” into “hundreds of millions.” Total cluelessness about even the most basic, elementary fundamentals of how to measure things.
1 Like
On top of that, the samples appeared to contain xenocrysts, probably from rock removed from the sides of the magma chamber or the volcano itself.
FWIW, I just got tentative authorization to do a little paid work on this project in a couple weeks, particularly the racemization dating aspect.
So, God willing, this thread isn’t going to be dead.
The interactions on the net with the evolutionists isn’t a promotional activity, it is for editorial review and soliciting critical examination.
For example, I’m defending Dr. Sanford’s thesis on another thread. In light of the way the critics of his theory have argued their case, I feel Dr. Sanford has a stronger case than he did in 2005, and he and I may write some of what was discussed in that thread for the benefit of ID-friendly and Creationist-friendly readers.
Peaceful Science is not a great place to do advertising for Creationism.
Dr. Sanford joined a modestly large team headed by Chair of the Geology department at Cedarville, Dr. John Whitmore to explore the Navajo Formation in the grand staircase. The Navajo and the Coconino formations are present interest of many YEC geologists in the USA.
From wiki:
102,300 sq mi (264,955.8 km2) - original extent of the Navajo Sand Sea may have been 2.5 times larger than this remaining outcrop
I don’t have the exact dimension, but this would be at a minimum 514 km in one dimension (taking the square root of 265,955). That’s pretty large.
By comparison Lake Ontario is puny!
These facts will be used in my next comment.
Are you going to use modern rates to extrapolate into the past?
This is an example of Navajo Sandstone:
Now, this is a hypothetical diagram of how the sediments to create the Navajo formation might happen. It has to spill from some mountain range. But that is not the end of the problem. What about the strata that is on top the Navajo sandstone, did it come from another region, or was the next strata source caused by an uplift of (in green to emphasize the problem). Why would the green are be discretely different in composition?
Under this scenario the sediments spill from one mountain range (on the right) and spill into some sort of basin on the left, but the sediments have to be spread out.to fill that area. So how long is the transport time from the right to the left to create one layer? You can see for yourself the sandstone alternates in the above picture from white and orange.
Not exactly, I’m going to report on the relative invariance of racemization across layers. The mainstream is of course free to postulate new laws of physics and chemistry to explain the presence of such non-racemic amino acids even after adjusting racemization rates by the Arrhenius equation.
In any case since you showed interest, here is the problem:
It looks like deposits from wind blown sand dunes to me. The steep cross bedding is usually the giveaway, but I am only an amateur geologist.
2 Likes
So you are using modern racemization rates. Don’t you find that a bit ironic?
Also, racemization rates vary wildly dependent on environment, don’t they?
Yes, but it can’t be slowed down beyond a certain point – as in make the temperatures freezing and freeze the oceans.
The point is, there will have to be some postulated environmental change to SLOW racemization down to keep things from decaying for like 400 million years.
AND, look at the chart. If there were sufficiently varying environmental conditions, the variance would increase over time, unless of course, one will invoke some sort of global systemic change.
Yes. Why would you expect them to change for a given boundary conditions like temperature and pH and chemistry?
No, because you’re quite ready to invoke environmental conditions to explain differing rates for chemicals, but you won’t even consider some of the experimental evidence I presented in another thread for possible rate changes in nuclear systems!
So you reject radiometric dating because of invented reasons for increased nuclear decay, but you don’t reject dating by racemization even though those rates are known to vary wildly dependent on environmental conditions. Do you see a problem?
1 Like
We can see alternating organ and white layers. Any estimate how long each layer took to form and what was the source. Did the sediments come from that mountain range 500 kilometers away?
The contact zone look pretty smooth and it looks like before the formation got folded and bent, the layers had to be laid down sequentially undisturbed for a very long time…
We already know you don’t care a bit about scientific correctness or accuracy. It’s all about how to sound scientific while pushing your anti-science YEC garbage to the unsuspecting rubes.
Of course not. There’s way too many scientifically literate people here not willing to yet all those YEC lies and duplicity slide.
1 Like
A question for Sal:
Geologists have dated historical eruptions going back billions of years. However, I’m interested in the ‘known’ eruptions of the last 20,000 years. Wikipedia has a chronological list of events measuring 6 or greater on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. I assume you agree with the dates listed (and their supporting evidence) until the time of the Flood. However that same evidence does not alter in the least at some arbitrary chronological boundary, and does not present worldwide underwater volcanism. Crater lake in Oregon is just one of many dozens of examples.
How do you explain this?
1 Like
For those sickened by YEC lies here is a good overview from the U. of Utah of the actual formation of the Navajo sandstone.
Age: Early Jurassic
The Navajo Sandstone is dated as Early Jurassic, although precise dating is typically difficult due to a lack of age diagnostic fossils, a common problem in eolian deposits.
Depositional Environment: Eolian (wind blown)
The Navajo Sandstone was deposited in an eolian environment composed of large sand dunes, similar to portions of the modern Sahara Desert. In an eolian environment there are two primary types of deposits: 1) dunes, typified by large-scale trough cross stratification; and 2) interdunes, which are the flat lying areas between dunes.
Paleogeography:
The Navajo Sandstone represents an enormous erg, a large sand sea. This sand sea extended over most of Utah as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. Though the deposits are known by different names in different areas, they were all a part of this major erg system. At this time, the modern Colorado Plateau region was at very low latitude, approximately 10o north of the equator (Blakey 2008). The Colorado Plateau region was located near the western edge of Laurentia, the western-most portion of North America (not having accreted to the rest of the continent by then). By the Early Jurassic, Pangaea had begun to break up.
Detrital zircon geochronology indicates that the Navajo erg received some sediment from the Appalachian Mountains via a continental scale river system similar to the modern Mississippi River. (Dickinson and Gehrels 2003; Rahl et al.2003) To the south and west of the erg were mountains of the nascent Cordilleran Arc, while to the east lay to the platform of central North America and the remnants of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains. Directly adjacent to the south and west of the erg lay the fluvial facies of the Kayenta Formation.
Tectonics:
Although the Navajo Sandstone was not deformed by the active tectonics, it did form in a basin that was a result of the regional tectonics. As the mountains to the south and west were uplifting a flexural basin was formed from the added mass of the new mountain range. The subsidence of this basin created room for the sand to be deposited in. This also caused deceleration of the regional winds due to a decrease in the pressure gradient, which caused the sand being transported by the wind to be deposited in the erg (Kocurek 2003).
Read more including a big list of other reference at the link.
2 Likes