CARBON 14 AND POTSSIUM-ARGON DATING

Reference Information from Kent Hovind

(Compiled and Comments by Harold M. Lind)

 

 

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 ˝ 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 ˝ 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.