Is radiocarbon dating flaws
And as we mentioned earlier the dates on the geologic column were chosen out of the clear blue sky with no scientific basis. So their entire dating method for dating rocks and fossils is based off of circular reasoning. The atmosphere has very distinctive layers to it. This radioactive carbon 14 is different from regular carbon. It is produced by radiation striking the atmosphere. In essence, sunlight strikes the atmosphere, slaps the nitrogen around, and turns it into carbon So it all starts by the sunlight striking the atmosphere.
About 21 pounds of carbon 14 is produced every year; and that is spread out all over the world. If you look at a periodic table you will notice that Carbon and Nitrogen are right next to each other. Nitrogen has an atomic weight of 14 and Carbon has an atomic weight of If the sunlight slaps the nitrogen around, like talked about earlier, it will knock a few things off of it and it becomes Carbon It still weighs as much as nitrogen, but it is now considered carbon.
It is called radioactive because it is unstable and will eventually break apart. On average half of it will break down every 5, years.
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While it is Carbon 14 it is floating around in the atmosphere and latches onto oxygen becoming carbon dioxide. During photosynthesis plants breathe in carbon dioxide and make it part of their tissue.
Answers to Creationist Attacks on Carbon-14 Dating
Animals eat plants and make it part of their bodies as well. This is how Carbon 14 gets into the living world. It gets produced in the atmosphere from the sun, the plants breathe it in, and the animals eat the plants. We have all either eaten plants or eaten animals that have eaten plants. The plants are breathing in this carbon dioxide and some of the carbon is radioactive. If the atmosphere contains. So, you probably have.
ANP264 | Spring 2013
When a plant or animal dies it stops taking in carbon 14 and whatever it had starts to decay. It was decaying while it was alive, but now there is nothing coming in to replace it. So what they do is compare the amount of carbon 14 in the fossil to the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere. If the fossil only contains half as much carbon 14 as the atmosphere, it is assumed to have been dead for one half-life, or 5, years. While it was alive it should have had.
If a fossil only has. In theory the amount of carbon 14 never goes to zero. However, for practical purposes we cannot measure passed a certain amount. There should be no measurable carbon 14 after about 40, — 50, years. Yet it has proven impossible to find any natural source of carbon below Pleistocene Ice Age strata that does not contain significant amounts of carbon 14, even though such strata are supposed to be millions or billions of years old.
These constitute very strong evidence that the earth is only thousands, not billions, of years old. Now think for a minute of what this means. The textbooks say that coal formed million years ago. However, when coal is tested it still has carbon How is that possible? If all of the carbon 14 atoms would have disappeared at a maximum of , years, why would there still be carbon 14 atoms in coal? Obviously it is not million years old. Also diamonds, which they say formed millions and millions of years ago, still have carbon 14 in them.
So how do you get carbon 14 in diamonds? Again it is obvious that they are not millions of years old. The carbon dating assumptions need to be pointed out. It is also losing carbon 14 through decay. The question is how long would it take the atmosphere to reach a stage called equilibrium? They wanted to figure out how long it would take the atmosphere to reach a point where the construction rate and the destruction rate of carbon 14 was the same. They determined that it would take about 30, years to reach this equilibrium state. They made two bad assumptions after they came up with this calculation.
When dating wood there is no such problem because wood gets its carbon straight from the air, complete with a full dose of C The creationists who quote Kieth and Anderson never tell you this, however. A sample that is more than fifty thousand years old shouldn't have any measurable C Coal, oil, and natural gas are supposed to be millions of years old; yet creationists say that some of them contain measurable amounts of C, enough to give them C ages in the tens of thousands of years.
How do you explain this? Radiocarbon dating doesn't work well on objects much older than twenty thousand years, because such objects have so little C left that their beta radiation is swamped out by the background radiation of cosmic rays and potassium K decay. Younger objects can easily be dated, because they still emit plenty of beta radiation, enough to be measured after the background radiation has been subtracted out of the total beta radiation.
However, in either case, the background beta radiation has to be compensated for, and, in the older objects, the amount of C they have left is less than the margin of error in measuring background radiation. As Hurley points out:. Without rather special developmental work, it is not generally practicable to measure ages in excess of about twenty thousand years, because the radioactivity of the carbon becomes so slight that it is difficult to get an accurate measurement above background radiation.
Cosmic rays form beta radiation all the time; this is the radiation that turns N to C in the first place. K decay also forms plenty of beta radiation. Stearns, Carroll, and Clark point out that ". This radiation cannot be totally eliminated from the laboratory, so one could probably get a "radiocarbon" date of fifty thousand years from a pure carbon-free piece of tin.
However, you now know why this fact doesn't at all invalidate radiocarbon dates of objects younger than twenty thousand years and is certainly no evidence for the notion that coals and oils might be no older than fifty thousand years. Creationists such as Cook claim that cosmic radiation is now forming C in the atmosphere about one and one-third times faster than it is decaying. If we extrapolate backwards in time with the proper equations, we find that the earlier the historical period, the less C the atmosphere had.
If they are right, this means all C ages greater than two or three thousand years need to be lowered drastically and that the earth can be no older than ten thousand years. Yes, Cook is right that C is forming today faster than it's decaying. However, the amount of C has not been rising steadily as Cook maintains; instead, it has fluctuated up and down over the past ten thousand years. How do we know this? From radiocarbon dates taken from bristlecone pines. There are two ways of dating wood from bristlecone pines: Since the tree ring counts have reliably dated some specimens of wood all the way back to BC, one can check out the C dates against the tree-ring-count dates.
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Admittedly, this old wood comes from trees that have been dead for hundreds of years, but you don't have to have an 8,year-old bristlecone pine tree alive today to validly determine that sort of date. It is easy to correlate the inner rings of a younger living tree with the outer rings of an older dead tree.
Traditional 14C testing assumes equilibrium in the rate of formation and the rate of decay. However, in the s, the growth rate was found to be significantly higher than the decay rate; almost a third in fact. It is produced by radiation striking the atmosphere. Answers to Creationist Attacks on Carbon Dating. Cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere are constantly converting the isotope nitrogen N into carbon C or radiocarbon.
The correlation is possible because, in the Southwest region of the United States, the widths of tree rings vary from year to year with the rainfall, and trees all over the Southwest have the same pattern of variations. When experts compare the tree-ring dates with the C dates, they find that radiocarbon ages before BC are really too young—not too old as Cook maintains.
For example, pieces of wood that date at about BC by tree-ring counts date at only BC by regular C dating and BC by Cook's creationist revision of C dating as we see in the article, "Dating, Relative and Absolute," in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. So, despite creationist claims, C before three thousand years ago was decaying faster than it was being formed and C dating errs on the side of making objects from before BC look too young , not too old.