C14 dating.

[ancientd]

Yes we assume ( or at least carbon dating teams) that carbon ISOTOPES , mainly of course C14, decay steadily but even if we allow this ( and of course this is not a given ) what about transmutation of Carbon to other elements during a cataclysmic but later event than it's death. For instance the famous 'Paulina West' (see www.ancientdestructions.com.au under ELECTRIC FOSSILIZATION ) noted that a fossilized dinosaur heart had been turned into a ferrous or ferric compound within the total fossil. Did this happen at the time of fossilization or at a later date?? Geological formations are subject to later inclusions and conversions . Why not fossils ?
ancientD

[ancientd]

ANOTHER THOUGHT IS THAT MOST CARBON DATING DOWN TO AROUND 5OOO YEARS relies on "wiggle matching tree ring standardization as a control. Yhis in fact is highly dubious as the so called wiggle matching relies on a " best fit" scenario. It is not an absolute. Now particularly in the "Anatolian tree ring sequences for the " middle east" these are dubious and at last raeding had 3 to 4 hundred year gaps which were being closed by let us say rationalistic processes.
However given that even this relatively young dating ( around 5000 years) is dodgy what is worse is the claim that carbon dating is accurate to around 40,000 years . In this case there is no control from a tree ring sequence ( suspect as that might seem ) It entirely relies on not only constant decay rates but as LIBBY points out :
Offering in 1952 his new radiocarbon method for calculating the age of organic material (the time interval since the plant or the animal died), W. F. Libby clearly saw the limitations of the method and the conditions under which his theoretical figures would be valid:

A. Of the three reservoirs of radiocarbon on earth—the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the hydrosphere, the richest is the last—the oceans with the seas. The correctness of the method depends greatly on the condition that in the last 40 or 50 thousand years the quantity of water in the hydrosphere (and carbon diluted in it) has not substantially changed. :

B. The method depends also on the condition that during the same period of time the influx of cosmic rays or energy particles coming from the stars and the sun has not suffered substantial variations.

[ancientd]

I thought on reading " Rick Firestone's lecture notes this was intersesting . He is the guy who found iridium penetrations in the mega faunal extinctions


:" Isomers: In some cases more than one form of an isotope can exist. These different forms of the isotope have the same number of protons and neutrons but different half-lives. They are different because the protons and neutrons can arrange themselves in different ways. There is an isomer of 60Co with a half-life of 10 minutes.

Can this apply to Carbon Isotopes as well ?

[The Great Dog]

Ask a few of the oldtimers about Leroy Ellenberger.

[davesmith_au]

Ask a few of the oldtimers about Leroy Ellenberger.

Crikey, Dog! That'll set the cat amongst the pigeons...

[ancientd]

Persian Paladin re no iridium amd carbon spherules in 3500 year old deposits . It is useful yo go to Rick Firestones Berekeley site for his papers on the extinction of the mega fauna . Although he dates them at I think 3 stages the last is only around 19,999 years ago and is marked by carbon ,tridium and iron pellet pitting at very high velocities. Mammoths on Wrangel island are conventional C12 at around 3000 years ago. Even if we question carbon daeing integrity this is still much younger than the 65 million years ago that was discussed

[seasmith]

fwiw,
Minus the C-14:

The biggest volcanic eruptions of the past half eon had seemed a likely culprit in the greatest mass extinction Earth has seen. Now the closest look yet at events 252 million years ago is linking those eruptions even more closely not only to the biotic cataclysm in the sea but also to the mass extinction on land.

An international group of scientists led by paleontologist Shu-zhong Shen of Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China intensively sampled the fossil record, they report today in Science. They examined nine rock outcrops across South China, not just the couple of sites most closely sampled in the past. Each sampling site spanned the mass extinction 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period. The sites included records from the sea, where fully 90% of species disappeared, as well as from the land.

Shen and his colleagues also used volcanic minerals to gauge when and how fast things happened at each site. Occasional volcanic eruptions had layered minerals throughout the outcrops. In order to date these minerals, the group used the steady decay of radioactive uranium to lead. Even though the eruptions happened a quarter-billion years ago, the method gave them an error of only about 100,000 years. Improvements to the mass spectrometer that counted uranium and lead atoms and to the sample preparation procedure had reduced the dating error by a factor of four.

"What's striking is how fast the extinction was," says paleontologist Douglas Erwin of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., a co-author on the paper. The event had been seen as lasting half a million years, but the new dating limits it to no more than 200,000 years and quite possibly less than 100,000 years, Erwin says. "We're paleontologists studying events 250 million years ago," he adds, so "a hundred thousand years sounds like overnight to us."

The dating also establishes that the extinction on land, apparently driven by extreme drying and warming, happened simultaneously with the marine extinction. And the new age for the extinction of 252.28 million years puts it within a mere few tens of thousands of years of the humongous lava outpourings that formed large deposits of volcanic rock known as the Siberian Traps. "We think the timing is consistent with the Siberian Traps eruptions being the major cause of the extinctions," Erwin says.

"It's quality data," says Paul Wignall, a paleontologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. "There was something going on with the eruptions, though we still don't understand the interaction" with living things. The new study may help answer that question, too. It also refined the timing of geochemical changes, which may hold clues to exactly how the eruptions trigged the biggest extinction. However it happened, the eruptions' belching—which included greenhouse gases and acid-generating sulfur—must have done in much of the life on land and in the sea.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... 4dff2ce558

see also:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=897&p=8894#p8894

[GaryN]

Carbon dating problems, and their possible causes. Kinda scary.
America got "nuked" in 12,500 BC!
http://www.viewzone.com/paleonuke.html

[Lloyd]

* I was lately reading the http://creationscience.com online book and found a lot of good scientific EU related info in it, such as the following.
C14 Dating
* Individual carbon-14 atoms can now be counted by using an atomic accelerator and sensitive instruments. With this new technique called Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), radiocarbon dating has become much more precise. AMS ages for old carbon-14 specimens are all about 5,000 years. [See “How Accurate Is Radiocarbon Dating?” on page 440.] AMS has sometimes been able to date the same materials previously dated by earlier, less-precise radiometric dating techniques. In those cases, AMS ages are usually 10–1000 times younger.24
... Radiocarbon resides primarily in the atmosphere, oceans, and organic matter. Therefore, electrical discharges through the crust at the beginning of the flood did not affect radiocarbon [unless there was much electrical activity in the atmosphere and oceans - LK]. However, those discharges and the resulting “storm” of electrons and neutrons in the crust produced almost all other radioisotopes, disturbed their tenuous stability, and allowed them to rapidly decay....
... Few scientists realize that on rare occasions heavy nuclei will decay by emitting a carbon-14 nucleus (14C).12 This undermines the basic assumptions of the radiocarbon dating technique, especially when one understands the origin of earth’s radioactivity. [See "How Accurate Is Radiocarbon Dating?" on pages 440–443.]
... “In addition to a particle decay, certain heavy mass nuclei have been observed to decay by emitting 12C, 14C, 20O, 24Ne, 28Mg, or 32Si at extremely low rates. This form of decay has been designated ‘Cluster Radioactivity,’ and was first observed in the emission of 14C from 223Ra. Since 1984, Cluster Radioactivity has been observed in 22 nuclides.” Baum et al., p. 31.

Rapid Increase in Radioactive Decay by Electricity
* Here's possibly the biggest news of all from this online book.
* Beta decay rates can increase dramatically when atoms are stripped of all their electrons. In 1999, Germany’s Dr. Fritz Bosch showed that, for the rhenium atom, this decreases its half-life more than a billionfold—from 42 billion years to 33 years.16 The more electrons removed, the more rapidly neutrons expel electrons (beta decay) and become protons. This effect was previously unknown, because only electrically neutral atoms had been used in measuring half-lives.17
... The Ukrainian experiments described on page 347 show that a high-energy, Z-pinched beam of electrons inside a solid produces superheavy elements that quickly fission into different elements that are typical of those in earth’s crust. Fusion and fission occur simultaneously, each contributing to the other—and to rapid decay. While we cannot be certain what happens inside nuclei under the extreme and unusual conditions of these experiments, or what happened in the earth’s crust during the flood, here are three possibilities:
- a. Electron Capture. Electrons that enter nuclei convert some protons to neutrons. (This occurs frequently....) Also, the dense sea of electrons reduces the mutual repulsion (Coulomb force) between the positively charged nuclei, sometimes bringing them close enough for the strong force to pull them together. Fusion results. Even superheavy nuclei form.
- b. Shock Collapse.88 Electrical discharges through the crust vaporize rock along very thin, branching paths “drilled” by gigavolts of electricity through extremely compressed rock. Rock along those paths instantly becomes a high-pressure plasma inside thin rock channels. Just as a bolt of lightning expands the surrounding air and produces a clap of thunder, the shock wave generated by the electrical heating suddenly expands the plasma and the surrounding channel walls. As that rock rebounds inward—like a giant, compressed spring that is suddenly released—the rock collapses with enough shock energy to drive (or fuse) nuclei together at various places along the plasma paths. This happens frequently deep in the crust where the rock is already highly compressed. Superheavy elements quickly form and then fission and decay into such elements as uranium and lead. The heat released propels the plasma and new isotopes along the channels. As the channels contract, flow velocities increase. The charged particles and new elements are transported to sites where minerals are grown, one atom at a time.
- c. Z-Pinch. As explained on page 342 and in "Self-Focusing Z-Pinch" on page 355, the path of each electrical charge in a plasma is like a “wire.” All “wires” in a channel are pinched together, but at each instant, pinching forces act only at the points occupied by moving charges, and each force is the sum of the electromagnetic forces produced by all nearby moving charges. Therefore, the closer the “wires,” the greater the self-focusing, pinching force, so the “wires” become even closer, until the strong force merges (fuses) nuclei.

Electrical Fusion and Fission
* Two nuclei, pushed toward each other, initially experience an increasing repelling force, called the Coulomb force, because both nuclei have positive charges. However, if a voltage is accelerating many nuclei in one direction and electrons are flowing between them in the opposite direction, that repelling force is largely neutralized. Furthermore, both positive and negative flows will produce a reinforcing Z-pinch. [See Figure 179 on page 342.] If the voltage driving both flows is large enough, the Z-pinch brings the two nuclei close enough together so that the strong force merges them into one large nucleus.21 If the Z-pinch acts over a broad plasma flow, many nuclei could merge into superheavy nuclei—nuclei much heavier than any chemical element found naturally. Of course, most merged nuclei would be unstable (radioactive) and would rapidly decay
... Since February 2000, thousands of sophisticated experiments at the Proton-21 Electrodynamics Research Laboratory (Kiev, Ukraine) have demonstrated nuclear combustion31 and have produced traces of all known chemical elements and their stable isotopes.32 In those experiments, a brief (10^-8 second), 50,000 volt, electron flow, at relativistic speeds, self-focuses (Z-pinches) inside a hemispherical electrode target, typically 0.5 mm in diameter. For the most part, the relative abundance of chemical elements produced corresponds to what is found in the earth’s crust.

Formation of Deuterium & Larger Elements
... At electrical breakdown, the energies in the surging electrons were thousands of times greater than 10–19 MeV, so for weeks after the flood began, bremsstrahlung radiation produced a sea of neutrons throughout the crust. Subterranean water absorbed many of these neutrons, converting normal hydrogen (1H) into heavy hydrogen (2H, called deuterium) and normal oxygen (16O) into 18O. Abundant surface water (a huge absorber) protected life.
* Once electrical forces form Deuterium from Hydrogen, then Helium and larger elements can form from Deuterium and Hydrogen by fusion.

[GaryN]

Not C14, but this page looks at huge dating discrepancies from closely located samples taken from a formation in the Grand Canyon. I can only think that the discrepancy is through electrical forces, and ity may be that most of the ages we are presented with, based on radioisotopes, may be total junk.
Significance of Highly Discordant Radioisotope Dates for Precambrian Amphibolites in Grand Canyon, USA

The assumption of constant radioisotope decay rates has undergirded the interpretation of all radioisotope data and the establishment of the absolute dates in the uniformitarian geologic timescale. Anomalous radioisotope dates that do not fit the chosen timescale are usually explained by open-system behavior and/or inheritance, and then discarded. Because most anomalous radioisotope dates are not published, it is difficult to know just what proportion of dating analyses in geochronology laboratories are discarded.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/article ... mphibolite

[knomegnome]

C14 dating may be junk, but people, we have Ice-Cores drilled from the Antarctic that have visible layers that go back 750,000 years .... there are more methods, including deposition rates, species lines involving microorganisms, and others that correlate with other geological dating methods. Many of those dating mechanisms can't use soft tissue or carbon though, which is why people are still using C14, even though they know it's unreliable. But even with EM influencing radioactive decay rates, we are still on a planet that is very, very old. It may not be the billions of years old we are told, but it is most certainly at least 100's of millions of years old, just looking at biological evidence. Maybe we'll never know just how old it is, but thousands of years? Not even in the ball park. Not with electric fossilization, inset contamination, C14 dating problems, and everything else combined. There is MASSIVE evidence showing corroboration here, which is why they are discarding "anomalously dated" samples in the first place.

Sure, this is bad science (C14 and others), but there is plenty of good science that has been done on this one.

[nick c]

we have Ice-Cores drilled from the Antarctic that have visible layers that go back 750,000 years

But do they? Mainstream dating methods that are based upon gradualist assumptions do not disprove catastrophism. (Keep in mind that there are ancient maps of both Greenland and Antarctica that show the land without the ice, but that discussion is probably better suited for another thread.)
There is another side to the story:
http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophi ... s/ice.html

[webolife]

Agreed. Fluctuations in atmospheric carbon load, temperature and precipitation produce multiple layering. These fluctuations could have happened over hours, days or weeks... The only reason to accept seasonal variation as the standard measure for ice core chronology is that's what we see today -- strictly uniformitarianism, with no acknowledgement of even a possibility that the oceans or atmosphere have undergone any significant catastrophic change in history or prehistory. This is simply an unwarranted assumption. Correlation with tree ring dating and or archaeological/historical correspondence puts reasonable radiocarbon dating reliability back to about 5000 BP. If the explosion of civilizations followed a major earth-shaking catastrophe, as many at this forum believe, then dates that precede those beginnings have little value. I try to gain some insight into older radiocarbon date results by remembering that:
1. In a world without the current climatic variations [as evidenced by the prevalence of [sub]tropical flora and fauna observed as fossils worldwide from "Cambrian" up to and into the glacial strata] there would have been significantly less mixing of C14 from the upper atmosphere with the biosphere, hence any objects predating or occurring soon after the end of the cataclysm will mostly be dated too old due to the lack of expected levels of C14 found in them.
2. The inherent error of radiocarbon dating is that near equilibrium C14 transfer/assimilation cannot be verified past about 3000 B.C.
3. The tiny amount of radiocarbon in present-day organics is in the neighborhood of about 1 part to one million parts C12 -- with a half life of less than 6 millenia, comparing this tiny ratio to ratios in former organics is subject to significant error and is only "validated" by reference to history, accepted archaeological research, or agreement with the user's particular earth history paradigm -- it's this latter problem that makes honest reporting or conclusions difficult to access or assess. Saying anything is 50,000 years old or BP by means of C14 dating is virtually meaningless.

[Lloyd]

* Nick's point about ice free maps is excellent.
* Web, can you point to any good sources on the C14 issue? Is there anything better than these?
http://www.icr.org/article/myths-regarding-radiocarbon-dating/
http://www.creationstudies.org/Education/dating_methods.html
http://creation.com/carbon-14-dating-explained-in-everyday-terms
http://creation.com/diamonds-a-creationists-best-friend
http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/c14_results.php
http://www.trueauthority.com/cvse/carbon.htm
* I could also link to Brown's online Hydroplate book, but I'll postpone that.

[knomegnome]

Ok... can you please explain to me, in some detail (or through a reference), the process you are supposing produced the ice's physical, bacteriological, pollen and other morphologies that suggest years of deposition?

And carbon load wouldn't affect fission-track dating, or uranium-thorium dating.. etc. I'd like to hear why you think they are also compromised. Thanks!