Geologists have established a set of principles that can be applied to sedimentary and volcanic rocks that are exposed at the Earth's surface to determine the. Researchers recently presented at a geophysics conference in Singapore radiocarbon dating results of dinosaur bones ranging from 22,000 to 39,000 years old, which.
How accurate are Carbon- 1. People wonder how millions of years could be squeezed into the biblical account of history.
Clearly, such huge time periods cannot be fitted into the Bible without compromising what the Bible says about the goodness of God and the origin of sin, death and suffering—the reason Jesus came into the world (See Six Days? Honestly!). Christians, by definition, take the statements of Jesus Christ seriously.
He said,“But from the beginning of the creation. God made them male and female” (Mark 1. This only makes sense with a time- line beginning with the creation week thousands of years ago.
The exosphere is the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere (i.e. It extends from the exobase, which is located at the top of the. Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the. How does radiocarbon dating work? All plants and animals on Earth are made principally of carbon. During the period of a plant's life, the plant is taking in carbon. In the latest of my series of articles on global warming, I offered evidence that global warming appears to be occurring, but evidence seems to be growing that.
It makes no sense at all if man appeared at the end of billions of years. We will deal with carbon dating first and then with the other dating methods.
How the carbon clock works. Carbon has unique properties that are essential for life on Earth.
Familiar to us as the black substance in charred wood, as diamonds, and the graphite in “lead” pencils, carbon comes in several forms, or isotopes. One rare form has atoms that are 1. C, or radiocarbon.
Carbon- 1. 4 is made when cosmic rays knock neutrons out of atomic nuclei in the upper atmosphere. These displaced neutrons, now moving fast, hit ordinary nitrogen (1. N) at lower altitudes, converting it into 1. C. Unlike common carbon (1.
C), 1. 4C is unstable and slowly decays, changing it back to nitrogen and releasing energy. This instability makes it radioactive. Ordinary carbon (1. C)is found in the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air, which is taken up by plants, which in turn are eaten by animals. So a bone, or a leaf or a tree, or even a piece of wooden furniture, contains carbon.
When the 1. 4C has been formed, like ordinary carbon (1. C), it combines with oxygen to give carbon dioxide (1. CO2), and so it also gets cycled through the cells of plants and animals. We can take a sample of air, count how many 1. C atoms there are for every 1.
C atom, and calculate the 1. C/1. 2C ratio. Because 1. C is so well mixed up with 1. C, we expect to find that this ratio is the same if we sample a leaf from a tree, or a part of your body.
In living things, although 1. C atoms are constantly changing back to 1. N, they are still exchanging carbon with their surroundings, so the mixture remains about the same as in the atmosphere.
However, as soon as a plant or animal dies, the 1. C atoms which decay are no longer replaced, so the amount of 1. C in that once- living thing decreases as time goes on. In other words, the 1. C/1. 2C ratio gets smaller. So, we have a “clock” which starts ticking the moment something dies. Obviously, this works only for things which were once living.
It cannot be used to date volcanic rocks, for example. The rate of decay of 1. C is such that half of an amount will convert back to 1.
N in 5,7. 30 years (plus or minus 4. This is the “half- life.” So, in two half- lives, or 1. Anything over about 5. C left. That is why radiocarbon dating cannot give millions of years.
In fact, if a sample contains 1. C, it is good evidence that it is not millions of years old.
However, things are not quite so simple. First, plants discriminate against carbon dioxide containing 1. C. That is, they take up less than would be expected and so they test older than they really are. Furthermore, different types of plants discriminate differently. Online Dating For Punks. This also has to be corrected for.
This would make things which died at that time appear older in terms of carbon dating. Then there was a rise in 1. CO2 with the advent of atmospheric testing of atomic bombs in the 1. Accordingly, carbon dating carefully applied to items from historical times can be useful. However, even with such historical calibration, archaeologists do not regard 1.
C dates as absolute because of frequent anomalies. They rely more on dating methods that link into historical records. Outside the range of recorded history, calibration of the 1. C . The amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth varies with the sun's activity, and with the Earth's passage through magnetic clouds as the solar system travels around the Milky Way galaxy. The strength of the Earth's magnetic field affects the amount of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere. A stronger magnetic field deflects more cosmic rays away from the Earth.
Overall, the energy of the Earth's magnetic field has been decreasing. This will make old things look older than they really are. Also, the Genesis flood would have greatly upset the carbon balance. The flood buried a huge amount of carbon, which became coal, oil, etc., lowering the total 1. C in the biosphere (including the atmosphere—plants regrowing after the flood absorb CO2, which is not replaced by the decay of the buried vegetation). Total 1. 4C is also proportionately lowered at this time, but whereas no terrestrial process generates any more 1.
C, 1. 4C is continually being produced, and at a rate which does not depend on carbon levels (it comes from nitrogen). Therefore, the 1. C/1. 2C ratio in plants/animals/the atmosphere before the flood had to be lower than what it is now.
Unless this effect (which is additional to the magnetic field issue just discussed) were corrected for, carbon dating of fossils formed in the flood would give ages much older than the true ages. Creationist researchers have suggested that dates of 3. Since the flood was accompanied by much volcanism (see Noah's Flood.
It does not give dates of millions of years and when corrected properly fits well with the biblical flood. Other radiometric dating methods. There are various other radiometric dating methods used today to give ages of millions or billions of years for rocks. These techniques, unlike carbon dating, mostly use the relative concentrations of parent and daughter products in radioactive decay chains.
For example, potassium- 4. These techniques are applied to igneous rocks, and are normally seen as giving the time since solidification.
The isotope concentrations can be measured very accurately, but isotope concentrations are not dates. To derive ages from such measurements, unprovable assumptions have to be made such as: The starting conditions are known (for example, that there was no daughter isotope present at the start, or that we know how much was there). Decay rates have always been constant. Systems were closed or isolated so that no parent or daughter isotopes were lost or added. There are patterns in the isotope data. There is plenty of evidence that the radioisotope dating systems are not the infallible techniques many think, and that they are not measuring millions of years.
However, there are still patterns to be explained. For example, deeper rocks often tend to give older “ages.” Creationists agree that the deeper rocks are generally older, but not by millions of years. Geologist John Woodmorappe, in his devastating critique of radioactive dating. The common application of such posterior reasoning shows that radiometric dating has serious problems.
Woodmorappe cites hundreds of examples of excuses used to explain “bad” dates. The authors decided that was “too old,” according to their beliefs about the place of the fossils in the evolutionary grand scheme of things. So they looked at some basalt further removed from the fossils and selected 1. Ma. The other nine samples again gave much older dates but the authors decided they must be contaminated and discarded them. That is how radiometric dating works. It is very much driven by the existing long- age world view that pervades academia today.
A similar story surrounds the dating of the primate skull known as KNM- ER 1. Various other attempts were made to date the volcanic rocks in the area.
Over the years an age of 2. Ma was settled upon because of the agreement between several different published studies (although the studies involved selection of “good” from “bad” results, just like Australopithecus ramidus, above).
However, preconceived notions about human evolution could not cope with a skull like 1. A study of pig fossils in Africa readily convinced most anthropologists that the 1. After this was widely accepted, further studies of the rocks brought the radiometric age down to about 1. Ma—again several studies “confirmed” this date. Such is the dating game. Are we suggesting that evolutionists are conspiring to massage the data to get what they want? No, not generally.
It is simply that all observations must fit the prevailing paradigm. The paradigm, or belief system, of molecules- to- man evolution over eons of time, is so strongly entrenched it is not questioned—it is a “fact.” So every observation must fit this paradigm. Unconsciously, the researchers, who are supposedly “objective scientists” in the eyes of the public, select the observations to fit the basic belief system. We must remember that the past is not open to the normal processes of experimental science, that is, repeatable experiments in the present. A scientist cannot do experiments on events that happened in the past. Scientists do not measure the age of rocks, they measure isotope concentrations, and these can be measured extremely accurately. However, the “age” is calculated using assumptions about the past that cannot be proven.
We should remember God's admonition to Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 3. Those involved with unrecorded history gather information in the present and construct stories about the past. The level of proof demanded for such stories seems to be much less than for studies in the empirical sciences, such as physics, chemistry, molecular biology, physiology, etc. Williams, an expert in the environmental fate of radioactive elements, identified 1. Earth at 4. 6 billion years. He shows that the few “good” dates left after the “bad” dates are filtered out could easily be explained as fortunate coincidences.
What date would you like? The forms issued by radioisotope laboratories for submission with samples to be dated commonly ask how old the sample is expected to be.