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Creationism/Evolution Title: CARBON 14 AND POTSSIUM-ARGON DATING Carbon 14 dating, what is it, and what are the problems with it? The earth’s atmosphere is about 100 miles thick. It contains 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, .06% carbon dioxide, and .0000765% radioactive carbon (c14), which mix equally with the other normal CO2 by the wind currents. This radioactive carbon 14 is inhaled and absorbed by animals and plants. The sun produces carbon 14 by striking the atmosphere and converting the nitrogen (atomic weight of 14) to carbon (atomic weight of 12) by knocking a few particles off of it. Because the carbon came from nitrogen, it is unstable and radioactive. From testing, scientists believe that carbon 14 breaks back down to nitrogen at the rate of ½ every 5,730 years (half life). During photosynthesis plants breath in CO2 and make it part of their tissue (some of it is C and some C14). Animals eat plants and make it part of their bodies. We eat plants and animals, so we have it too. When something dies, it stops taking in C14. It is assumed that the ratio of radioactive C14 to normal C12 in the atmosphere would be the same ratio found in the living plants and animals. Scientists assume that you should have .0000765% of C14 in your body. By measuring the amount and given that it decays by ½ every 5,730 years, you should be able to get an estimation for how old something is. It should be noted that after about 5 half lives, it becomes almost impossible to detect the level of C14. This means that assuming that there is nothing else wrong with C14, it may only be accurate for about 40,000 years. So you can’t date things as being millions of years old, let along billions of years with C14. An assumption is made that the amount of C14 in the atmosphere has always been the same. The amount of C14 in the atmosphere has actually been increasing. It has not reached equilibrium yet. It has been estimated that it would take 30,000 years for the earth to reach equilibrium. Because scientists believed that the earth was billions of years old, they assumed that C14 had reached equilibrium. The problem is that it hasn’t. There is more C14 in the atmosphere today than there was a decade ago. The calibration curve for C14 dating measures the number of Geiger counter clicks in a minute. If you tested a living thing, you would expect to get 16 clicks per minute, which would mean the C14 in the organism has gone through 0 years of decay. If you got 8 clicks a minute it would be 1 half-life and be 5,730 years old. 4 clicks would be 11,460, etc. As you get down to 1 or 2 clicks, you are pretty much at the limit. The problem is that science can only measure the amount of C14 in the fossil and know the rate of decay today. They don’t know if the rate of decay has been constant, nor how much C14 was in the atmosphere thousands of years ago. If there was a covering of water around the earth as is alluded to in the Bible, this would have blocked X-Ray and UV Radiation. This would have caused there to not be much C14 in the original atmosphere. This may have meant that a living organism only gave off 4 clicks a minute when it was 0 years old. If we used our scale on the fossil after it died, and it was measuring 2 clicks, we would say it was 17,190 years old, when it was really under 6000 years old. Some examples of why C14 is not a good system for measuring age: 1. Living mollusk shells were carbon dated as being 2300 years old. (Science vol. 141, 1963 pp. 634-637). 2. A freshly killed seal was carbon dated as having died 1300 years ago. (Antarctic Journal, vol. 6 Sept-Oct. 1971, p. 211). 3. Shells from living snails were carbon dated as being 27,000 years old. (Science vol. 224, 1984, pp. 58-61). 4. One part of the Vollosovitch mammoth carbon dated at 29,500 years old and another part at 44,000. (Troy L. Pewe, Quarternary Stratigraphic Nomenclature in Unglaciated Central Alaska, Geological Survey Professional Paper 862, p. 30). 5. One part of Dima, a baby frozen mammoth, was 40,000, another part was 26,000 and the wood immediately around the carcass was 9-10,000 years old” (Troy L. Pewe, Quarternary Stratigraphic Nomenclature in Unglaciated Central Alaska, Geological Survey Professional Paper 862, p. 30). 6. The lower leg of the Fairbanks Creek mammoth had a radiocarbon age of 15,380 RCY (Radio Carbon Years), while its skin and flesh were 21,300 RCY. (Harold E. Anthony, Natures Deep Freeze. Natural History, Sept. 1949, p. 300). 7. The two Colorado Creek, AK Mammoths had radiocarbon ages of 22,850 and 16,150 respectively. (Robert M. Thorson and R. Dale Guthrie, Stratigraphy of the Colorado Creek Mammoth Locality, Alaska. Quaternary Research, vol. 37, no. 2, March 1992, pp. 214-228). 8. Living Penguins have been dated as being 8,000 years old. 9. Material from layers where dinosaurs are found carbon dated at 34,000 years old. (R. Daly, Earth’s Most Challenging Mysteries, 1972, p. 280). 10. Russian scientists Kusnetsov and Ivanov carbon dated dinosaur bones at less than 30,000 years. (Strange Stores, Amazing Facts, Readers Digest, 1978, p. 335). 11. Hugh Miller, Columbus, OH had 4 dinosaur one samples carbon dated at 20,000 years old. The samples were not identified as dinosaur in advance. (Noah to Abram the Turbulent Years by Erich von Fange, p. 36). 12. A geologist at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, Carl Swisher uses the most advanced techniques to date human fossils. Last spring he was re-evaluating Homo erectus skulls found in Java in the 1930s by testing the sediment found with them. A hominid species assumed to be an ancestor of Homo sapiens; erectus was thought to have vanished some 250,000 years ago. But even though he used two different dating methods, Swisher kept making the same startling find: the bones were 53,000 years old at most and possibly no more than 27,000 years (the difference between these two years is a 96% error rate) – a stretch of time contemporaneous with modern humans. (Leslie Kaufman, Did a Third Human Species Live Among Us? Newsweek, December 23, 1996, p. 52). Things to consider about carbon 14 dating: 1. Wild dates are obtained. 2. Dates that don’t fit evolution theory are rejected and not published. “Correct dates match the geologic column. 3. It is based on the assumptions that: A. The original content of the sample is known. B. The decay rate never changes. C. The sample has not been contaminated. In carbon dating, when samples of a known age are test, Radioisotope Dating doesn’t work. When samples are of an unknown age, Radioisotope Dating is assumed to work. This doesn’t make sense. “Ever since William Smith at the beginning of the 19th century, fossils have been and still are the best and most accurate method of dating and correlating the rocks in which they occur. Apart from very ‘modern’ examples, which are really archaeology, I can think of no cases of radioactive decay being used to date fossils.” (Derek V. Ager, Fossil Frustrations, New Scientist, vol. 100, November 10, 1983, p. 425). “Radiometric dating would not have been feasible if the geologic column had not been erected first.” (J.E. O’Rourke, Pragmatism versus Materialism in Stratigraphy, American Journal of Science, vol. 276, January 1976, p. 54). “In the last two years an absolute date has been obtained for the Ngandong beds, above the Trinil beds, and it has the very interesting value of 300,000 years plus or minus 300,000 years (so they don’t really know). (J.B. Birdsell, Human Evolution, Rand McNally, 1975, p. 295). Moon rocks brought back in 1969, were given to many different laboratories to be dated. One rock (specimen 10017) was divided into 6 pieces and dated many times. The ages ranged from 2.5 billion to 4.6 billion years. This is a 90% error rate, from the same rock. James P. Dawson, Chief of Engineering and Operations for the Lunar and Earth Science Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center NASA in Houston. He worked on lunar samples including the Genesis rock. He said they found ages from 10,000 years to several billion years in the same rock. Potassium-Argon dating: Potassium-Argon dating can supposedly date older rocks and fossils than carbon 14 because it has a longer half-life of 1.3 billion years. The potassium decays to argon and the half-life was determined by measuring the number of particles that decayed in a 3 or 4 day period, then extrapolating for the time it would take for half the sample to decay. This doesn’t seem to be a very accurate way to measure half-life, especially if you are talking about a billion years. Scientists believe that lava, also known as basalt, has no argon in it when it is ejected from a volcano. After coming out, the potassium starts to decay to argon. Because it starts without argon, the basalt is assumed to be the perfect stuff to date. Potassium-Argon is not accurate at all. Here are some examples of the dating of volcanic lava: 1. Basalt from Mt. Etna, Sicily from an eruption in 122 BC gave an age of 250,000 years old, when we know it is less than 2,000 years old (G.B. Dalyrmple, 1969 40Ar/36Ar analysis of historic lava flows. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 6-47 55). 2. Lava from the 1801 Hawaiian volcano eruption gave a date of 1.6 million years old. (G.B. Dalyrmple, 1969 40Ar/36Ar analysis of historic lava flows. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 6-47 55). It was only 200 years old. 3. Basalt from Mt. Kilauea Iki, Hawaii (erupted in 1959) gave an age of 8,500,000. (Impact #307 Jan. 1999). 4. Basalt from Mt. Etna, Sicily (erupted in 1964) gave a date of 700,000 years old. (Impact #307 Jan. 1999). 5. Basalt from Mt. Etna, Sicily (erupted in 1972) gave an age of 350,000 years old. (Impact #307 Jan. 1999). 6. New Lava dome growing inside the crater of Mt. St. Helens since the 1980 eruption was dated at 350,000 to 2.8 million years old (S.A. Austia, 1996. Excess Argon Within Mineral Concentrates from the New Dacite Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens Volcano, CIN Tech Journal 10(3), pp. 335-343). As we can see, carbon 14 and potassium-argon dating are not accurate, and cannot determine the age of anything, because they are based on false assumptions.
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http://www.drdino.com/carbon-dating/ Does carbon dating prove the earth is millions of years old? * Written by: CSE * Tags: Radiometric Dating * Difficulty: Beginner Whenever the worldview of evolution is questioned, the topic of carbon dating always comes up. Here is how carbon dating works and the assumptions it is based upon. How Carbon Dating Works Radiation from the sun strikes the atmosphere of the earth all day long. This energy converts about 21 pounds of nitrogen into radioactive carbon 14. This radioactive carbon 14 slowly decays back into normal, stable nitrogen. Extensive laboratory testing has shown that about half of the C-14 molecules will decay in 5,730 years. This is called the half-life. After another 5,730 years half of the remaining C-14 will decay leaving only 1:0;4 of the original C-14. It goes from 1:0;2 to 1:0;4 to 1:0;8, etc. In theory it would never totally disappear, but after about 5 half-lives the difference is not measurable with any degree of accuracy. This is why most people say carbon dating is only good for objects less than 40,000 years old. Nothing on earth carbon dates in the millions of years, because the scope of carbon dating only extends a few thousand years. Willard Libby invented the carbon dating technique in the early 1950s. The amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere today is about .0000765%. It is assumed there would be the same amount found in living plants or animals since the plants breath CO2 and animals eat the plants. Since sunlight causes the formation of C-14 in the atmosphere, and normal radioactive decay takes it out, there must be a point where the formation rate and the decay rate equalizes. This is called the point of equilibrium. To illustrate: If you were trying to fill a barrel with water but there were holes drilled up the side of the barrel, as you filled the barrel it would begin leaking out the holes. At some point you would be putting it in and it would be leaking out at the same rate. You will not be able to fill the barrel past this point of equilibrium. In the same way the C-14 is being formed and decaying simultaneously. A freshly created earth would require about 30,000 years for the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere to reach this point of equilibrium because it would leak out as it is being filled. Tests indicate that the earth has still not reached equilibrium. There is more C-14 in the atmosphere now than there was 40 years ago. This would prove the earth is not yet 30,000 years old! This also means that plants and animals that lived in the past had less C-14 in them than do plants and animals today. Just this one fact totally upsets data obtained by C-14 dating. The carbon in the atmosphere normally combines with oxygen to make carbon dioxide (CO2). Plants breathe CO2 and make it part of their tissue. Animals eat the plants and make it part of their tissues. A very small percentage of the carbon plants take in is radioactive C-14. When a plant or animal dies, it stops taking in air and food so it should not be able to get any new C-14. The C-14 in the plant or animal will begin to decay back to normal nitrogen. The older an object is, the less carbon 14 it contains. One gram of carbon from living plant material causes a Geiger counter to click 16 times per minute as the C-14 decays. A sample that causes 8 clicks per minute would be 5,730 years old (the sample has gone through one half-life) and so on. The Assumptions of Carbon Dating Although this technique looks good at first, carbon-14 dating rests on at least two simple assumptions. These are, obviously, the assumption that the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere has always been constant and that its rate of decay has always been constant. Neither of these assumptions is provable or reasonable. An illustration may help: Imagine you found a candle burning in a room, and you wanted to determine how long it was burning before you found it. You could measure the present height of the candle (say, 7 inches) and the rate of burn (say, an inch per hour). In order to find the length of time since the candle was lit, we would be forced to make some assumptions. We would, obviously, have to assume that the candle has always burned at the same rate, and assume an initial height of the candle. The answer changes based on the assumptions. Similarly, scientists do not know that the carbon-14 decay rate has been constant. They do not know that the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere is constant. Present testing shows the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere has been increasing since it was first measured in the 1950s. This may be tied in to the declining strength of the magnetic field. In addition to the above assumptions, dating methods are all subject to the geologic column date to verify their accuracy. If a date obtained by radiometric dating does not match the assumed age from the geologic column, the radiometric date will be rejected. The so-called geologic column was developed in the early 1800s over a century before there were any radio- metric dating methods. “Apart from very ‘modern’ examples, which are really archaeology, I can think of no cases of radioac- tive decay being used to date fossils.”1 Laboratories will not carbon date dinosaur bones (even frozen ones which could easily be carbon dated) because dinosaurs are supposed to have lived 70 million years ago according to the fictitious geologic column. An object’s supposed place on the geologic column determines the method used to date it. There are about 7 or 8 radioactive elements that are used today to try to date objects. Each one has a different half-life and a different range of ages it is supposed to be used for. No dating method cited by evolutionists is unbiased.2 The Wild Dates of Carbon Dating A few examples of wild dates by radiometric dating: * Shells from living snails were carbon dated as being 27,000 years old. 3 * Living mollusk shells were dated up to 2,300 years old. 4 * A freshly killed seal was carbon dated as having died 1,300 years ago. 5 * “One part of the Vollosovitch mammoth carbon dated at 29,500 years and another part at 44,000.” 6 * “Structure, metamorphism, sedimentary reworking, and other complications have to be considered. Radiometric dating would not have been feasible if the geologic column had not been erected first.”7 * Material from layers where dinosaurs are found carbon dated at 34,000 years old.8 Footnotes 1. Ager, Derek V., “Fossil Frustrations,” New Scientist, vol. 100 (November 10, 1983), p. 425) ]7; 2. (Creation Seminar Part #7; Bones of Contention by Marvin Lubenow; Scientific Creationism by Henry Morris) ]7; 3. Science vol. 224, 1984, pp. 58-61 ]7; 4. Science vol. 141, 1963, pp. 634-637 ]7; 5. Antarctic Journal vol. 6, Sept-Oct. 1971, p. 211 ]7; 6. Troy L. Pewe, “Quaternary Strigraphic Nomencature in Uniglaciated Central Alaska,” Geologic Survey Professional Paper 862 (U.S. Gov. Printing Office, 1975) p. 30 ]7; 7. J. E. O’Rourke, “Pragmatism vs. Material- ism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, vol. 276 (January,1976), p. 54 ]7; 8. Reginald Daly, Earth’s Most Challenging Mysteries, 1972, p. 280 ]7;
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