Answers in Genesis: RATE group reveals exciting breakthroughs!
Basically, the RATE project (Radioactivity and the Age of The Earth) has completed some of its studies, and has come back with some interesting findings. Here's their paper (PDF), much of which is far beyond my comprehension, but the Answers in Genesis article summarizes it as follows:
* When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas which readily escapes from rock.
* Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
* By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
* There is a significant amount of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is at first glance surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
* Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than between 4,000 and 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5680 (+/- 2000) years.
Interestingly, they also found that C-14 is present in diamonds, when given how old diamonds are supposed to be there shouldn't have been any C-14 left. No one's ever dated diamonds before? Could these be "recently formed" diamonds? How long are diamonds supposed to take to form in nature?
Oh, the diamonds they tested were pre-cambrian, therefore they couldn't have been recently formed according to evolutionary theory. I guess I didn't read carefully enough:
This latter suggestion about primordial C-14 appears to have been somewhat spectacularly supported when Dr Baumgardner sent a diamond for C-14 dating. It was the first time this had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—i.e. the diamond, formed deep inside the earth in a ‘Precambrian’ layer, nevertheless contained radioactive carbon, even though it ‘shouldn’t have’.
This is exceptionally striking evidence, because a diamond has remarkably powerful lattice bonds, so there is no way that subsequent biological contamination can be expected to find its way into the interior.
The diamond’s carbon-dated ‘age’ of <58,000 years is thus an upper limit for the age of the whole earth. And this age is brought down still further now that the helium diffusion results have so strongly affirmed dramatic past acceleration of radioactive decay.
Thursday, August 21, 2003
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