Recent Work Pays Dividends⤒🔗

American scientists from the Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society set up a committee to study dating techniques, which are often used to justify claims that the earth is very old. This was several years ago.

Specifically, these scientists wanted to find out how the numbers obtained from most studies on rocks, could be explained in the context of a relatively young earth. They therefore asked some extra questions that secular scientists were not asking. This team had their own ideas as to what the answers would be, but they had to ac­tually do the studies to find out if their ideas were valid. The hundreds of thou­sands of dollars required for this research had to come from donations since no gov­ernment agency in the United States would support such work.

But the money did come in and the highly technical research was carried out. The answers, while not exactly what they had predicted (in some cases), neverthe­less did help to explain how young rocks and thus a young earth came to be the way they are. The secular data, when examined in the context of these recent studies, in no way justify conclusions of an old earth.

Why Is There Still So Much C14?←↰⤒🔗

Originally this group — known as the RATE team (short for Radioactivity and the Age of the Earth) — had not intended to look specifically at carbon fourteen dat­ing. Since the half-life of carbon fourteen (C14) is only 5,730 years, this element ob­viously is not a popular secular dating choice when the expectation is for ages in the million or billion year range. What this element can do for us, however, is to indi­cate an unexpectedly young age for certain materials. With so short a half-life, a quan­tity of carbon fourteen, no matter how large, will disappear completely (turn back into nitrogen fourteen) within 250,000 years — the time it takes for 43.6 half-lives.

Most natural carbon exists in the sta­ble form called carbon twelve. Nowadays only one atom in one trillion is carbon four­teen. This latter atom is produced when a cosmic ray strikes an atom of nitrogen four­teen. That converts the atom into a ra­dioactive atom of carbon fourteen. However after 5,730 years, one half of all the ra­dioactive carbon atoms present will have reverted to stable nitrogen fourteen. After another 5,730 years, a further half will have decayed, leaving only a quarter of the orig­inal carbon fourteen left after only 11,460 years. And the process of decay continues. Everybody agrees on all this, so how can it be a problem for secular science?

Living plants and animals all accumu­late some carbon fourteen while they are alive. Through photosynthesis, plants turn carbon dioxide into food. Thus radioactive carbon in fairly similar proportions to its presence in air, is turned into plant tissue. Animals eat plants, so they also contain car­bon fourteen in proportions somewhat sim­ilar to air. Once a plant or animal dies however, it stops the intake of nutrients. The only place for the carbon fourteen lev­els already present in this tissue to go, is down and out. Obviously organic material, no matter how well preserved, if it is older than 250,000 years, should contain ab­solutely zero radioactive carbon fourteen. Imagine then, the reaction of the scientific establishment to actual analyses of ancient carbon. Whether it is ancient coal or fos­silized shells or whatever, all organic mate­rial contains detectable levels of carbon fourteen. Doesn't this mean these materials are young in age? That is a good question!

Millions of Years Old?←↰⤒🔗

Early carbon fourteen studies, per­formed in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, were con­ducted using a beta-decay counting technique. This method however, was un­able to distinguish cosmic rays from particles emanating from the carbon source. Thus the method could not reliably mea­sure low levels of carbon fourteen.

Within the past twenty years however, the much more sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) method has come into general use. These machines are so precise they are fully capable of measuring carbon fourteen levels as low as 0.001 percent of modern carbon (pmc). Based on the known rate of carbon fourteen decay, a measure­ment of 0.79 pmc translates by a simple equation into an age estimate of 40,000 years, 0.24 pmc to 50,000 years, 0.070 pmc to 60,000 years, and 0.011 pmc to 75,000 years and 0.001 pmc to 95,000 years.

The expectation of the secular science community obviously has been that organic carbon materials considered to be millions, ten of millions or even hundreds of millions of years old, will contain no radioactive carbon. The scientific literature however is full of studies on ancient materials, which have documented significant quantities of carbon fourteen far in excess of the AMS threshold, even when extreme pre-treat­ment methods are applied to exclude any modern contamination.

The RATE Team Rocks←↰⤒🔗

The RATE team's recent work is a case in point. The team obtained ten samples of coal from the U. S. Department of En­ergy Coal Sample Bank maintained at Penn State University. The large original samples in the energy bank had been carefully col­lected from recently exposed surfaces in active mines They were placed in argon gas in specially sealed containers to pre­vent contamination. Later these samples were divided into smaller amounts, also sealed in non reactive argon gas. The RATE team selected ten samples from geograph­ically widely dispersed sources, of which three were said to be of Eocene age (about 40 million years), three of Cretaceous age (about 100 million), and four of Pennsyl­vanian age (about 300 million). These sam­ples were then analyzed for carbon fourteen at one of the foremost AMS labo­ratories in the world.

Obviously none of these samples should have contained any carbon four­teen. Nevertheless they all did. The highest measured level was 0.46 pmc for a Penn­sylvanian age coal and the lowest was 0.10 pmc for a Cretaceous specimen. These mea­surements suggested ages of 40,000 to 60,000 years for samples which secular sci­entists would date at 40 million to 350 mil­lion years. In similar studies, strenuous attempts by secular scientists have been conducted to eliminate any modern conta­mination, but in paper after paper, these people have had to admit that such values are "intrinsic to the samples" or real.

Many readers will realize that esti­mates such as 60,000 years are far older than a conservative young earth model would suggest. The RATE authors how­ever consider various assumptions about likely carbon fourteen levels on the early earth. For example, they assume that car­bon fourteen levels were initially near zero and that these steadily increased as time passed. By the time of the flood, when huge amounts of organic material were buried, the carbon fourteen level in the at­mosphere may well still have been much lower than our modern values. Thus the starting values of radioactive carbon in these organic materials may have been much lower than modern observations would suggest. It would then require a much shorter period of decay to reach the values we observe today in these coal sam­ples. Thus the real time interval could be much shorter than 60,000 years.

One further interesting observation is that the average values for the three coal samples are all close together: 0.26 pmc for Eocene samples, 0.21 for Cretaceous, and 0.27 pmc for Pennsylvanian. These values were all obtained by a world class labora­tory. The data suggest that these samples were all buried about the same time. The indication is that huge depths of sedimentary rock were deposited in a single event ­presumably the flood of Noah.

The RATE team has more studies, all with hard data and theoretical models, and all are consistent with a young earth model. Observers who are already commit­ted to long ages, may choose to ignore these studies. The data however merit serious consideration. Now, more than ever, people who think that science has "proved" the earth to be ancient, should pause to read these papers. Discussion and criticism are fine and are appreciated. Ignoring these studies is not fine. Make no mistake, the creationists are developing a powerful par­adigm/model.