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The Arctic Subtropic

Anonymous Sat 06 Jun 17:40:38 2020 No.11768268 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>11768281 >>11769693 >>11770218 >>11771415 >>11772350 >>11772549 >>11772726 >>11783971 >>11784432

Discuss.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 06 Jun 2020 17:57:19 No.11768281 Report

Quoted By: >>11772350 >>11776293

>>11768268
Warmer climate.
We're still technically in an ice age... Sort of.
It's much cooler now then it was 15million years ago.
But there is a warm period about 3million years ago, enough to move the subtropical flora region further north.
If the warm gulf stream was active it easily would have pushed this further north again, especially if it's a strong gulf stream. I doubt all the way to the artic, but I don't think there would have been much ice. Borreal Forrest likely would have extended to the very far north however.

Obviously this all changed once you get past 1million years ago as things gradually got cooler, with brief warm periods inbetween, but on average, got cooler.

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!qlcLm/8xc. Sat 06 Jun 2020 21:51:38 No.11768888 Report

Quoted By: >>11768893 >>11769636

The Canadian island of Axel Heiberg, in Nunavut, well above the Arctic Circle, well beyond the present tree line, is littered with the remains of ancient forests -- stumps, logs, and remnants of leaves and even fruit. Although the relics of such forests are known from other parts of the world, those on Axel Heiberg are exceptional because, unlike other remains, they have not been petrified. On the contrary, the remains have maintained their original form and even tissue. The retrieved wood still splits and splinters and can be carved with a sharp knife. It burns as good as modern wood. It has even retained the hue of soft lumber. Not only trees have been preserved, but also leaf mats the likes of which one finds on the ground in modern forests. Barren, gaunt, and forbidding as the island now is, its rolling hills bear the traces of more than twenty separate forest layers, stacked on top of each other, all of which are found in situ, testifying to growth on the spot rather than transmission by the forces of nature. The age between each individual forest layer, which consist of sediment a few meters in thickness, has been calculated to be anything from a few hundred to thousands of years.

As James Basinger noted, these vestiges point to 'a lengthy warm spell during the Eocene epoch ... when mean annual polar temperatures ranged from seven to 15 C.' [36]

'Tall trees not unlike the towering redwoods of the Pacific Northwest -- and genetically similar to birch, alder and swamp cypress -- grew beside a meandering river delta hundreds of kilometers wide. Some of these giants were 35 m high, with stumps 2.5 m around, and appear to have lived for as long as 1,000 years.' [37]

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!qlcLm/8xc. Sat 06 Jun 2020 21:52:49 No.11768893 Report

Quoted By: >>11768898 >>11773898

>>11768888

The problem that has been facing paleobotanists is how such forests could have thrived in a latitude which at present would have forced them to 'sleep' through the long polar night. As Art Johnson who, independent of Basinger, have been studying these remains, noted: 'We have no forests on Earth where the trees are so big and have to sit in the dark for three months.' [38]

Axel Heiberg Island is not the only area in Canada's High Arctic where the remains of ancient forests have been found. The coal-bearing sediments of the Eureka Sound Group scattered throughout most of the Arctic Archipelago also contain such remains. Plants dated to the Paleocene from Fosheim Peninsula of Ellesmere Island resemble similar Paleocene flora from Western Canada's interior, indication of a cosmopolitan temperate zone. [39] Some of the plants from these Tertiary forests have been described as being akin to those growing in the present cypress swamps of Florida. [40] Others, like oak, do not grow in swamps. Trees from the middle Eocene in the same area reached up to 50 meters high.

The fossils of animals found buried amid the remains of these forests -- ancestors of the horse and rhinoceros, giant lizards, land tortoises, salamanders, snakes, alligators, crocodiles, flying lemurs [41] -- nall testify to the warmth of the climate at that time, as so does the discovery of fossil palm trees and huge exotic ferns by Soviet paleobotanists in the islands of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago far within the Arctic Circle. [42] Even fossil tapirs, the descendants of which now live in the equatorial Amazon forest, were found on Ellesmere Island. [43] As Ian Johnson (not to be confused with Art Johnson, cited above) noted, finding the tropics in such high latitudes raises serious implications for paleontologists:

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!qlcLm/8xc. Sat 06 Jun 2020 21:53:51 No.11768898 Report

Quoted By: >>11768900

>>11768893

'This far from the equator means 4 months of polar darkness ... If the night temperature was always 10 degrees Celsius, in conjunction with 4 months of darkness, plants would die. Mammals found to date are likely middle Eocene creatures. Crocodiles, lizards and turtles are well adapted to forest life but some of the discovered species [the crocodilians] cannot tolerate near freezing temperatures for very long. This implies that there had to be considerable warmth in the Eocene High Arctic all throughout the the year.' [44]

And:

'Crocodilians are a test of the reconstructed polar forest community because they have changed little since the end of the Triassic ... the crocodilians have been consistent throughout their long evolutionary history in their limited tolerance of the cold. Crocodilia have never occupied ecological niches where near-freezing cold persists continuously for months.' [45] Alligators are more adapted to cold weather than crocodiles. Crocodiles require shallow water, but crocodiles in water that is colder than 65 F tend to sink to the bottom in lassitude and drown as they do in places even like Florida during severe cold weather.

The scientific establishment, meanwhile, has not been entirely silent when it comes to propositions concerning the solution of the puzzle which the one-time existence of these Arctic forests raise. Thus, for instance, writers in New Scientist proposed that the Arctic Eocene's subtropical climate can be explained if the oceans transported far more heat to the poles than they do at present. [46] But evidence of the atmospheric circulation required for this, which depends on temperature differential, is lacking. Moreover, the small size of particles retrieved from Eocene deep-sea sediments confirm the lack of wind speeds at that time. [47]

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!qlcLm/8xc. Sat 06 Jun 2020 21:54:53 No.11768900 Report

Quoted By: >>11768910 >>11779259

>>11768898

Continental drift must also be ruled out because Axel Heiberg Island is 'only a few hundred kilometers closer to the North Pole than it was when the forests flourished' [48] -- which is definitely not enough for it to have been located outside the Arctic Circle at that time. As Johnson noted: 'Modern geological field work has confirmed that the northern lands of the globe have been located in polar latitudes for at least the last 100 million years, despite ongoing continental drift.' [49]

Leo Hickey's 'observation' that 'fossil leaf fragments indicate that the deciduous leaves were enormous' [50] has remained somewhat controversial. [51] He, however, claims to have returned from his 1979 field season with fossil leaf fragments, one of which measured two feet in width. [52] Gigantic leaves are known to develop when plants are grown under constant lighting conditions. Thus, his conclusion was that these forests 'grew under conditions of continuous light.' [53] Hickey then proposed that a bank of thick fog could have hung over the forests during the Arctic winter, which fog would have retained enough heat to cause a greenhouse effect. [54] What would have caused the fog, or why such a fog is not at present evident in the polar regions, he left unexplained.

Curt Teichert was honest enough to admit that 'attempts to explain rapid climatic changes throughout the Tertiary have been 'especially vexing and unsatisfactory'.' [55] As D H Campbell wrote: 'It is difficult to imagine any possible conditions of climate in which these plants could grow so near the pole, deprived of sunlight for many months of the year.' [56] Or, as David Mech was forced to conclude, the causes behind such a radical different climate 'remain a mystery.'" [57]

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!qlcLm/8xc. Sat 06 Jun 2020 21:58:03 No.11768910 Report

Quoted By: >>11768913 >>11771457

>>11768900

sauces:

[36] J George, "The Forest of the Past," Macleans's (September 6, 1999), pp 16-17.

[37][38] Ibid, p 17.

[39][40] IC Johnson, "Basinger's Lecture on the Eocene Forests of the Canadian High Arctic," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop 1989:2, p 17.

[41] "The Eocene Climate Puzzle," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop 1989:1, p 27; IC Johnson, "Anomalous Occurrence of Crocodilia in Eocene Polar Forests," Chronology and Catastrophism Review XIV (1992), p 7.

[42] "Fossils Date the Tilt of Earth's Axis," Globe & Mail (June 8, 1984). NOTE: For even earlier Triassic remains, which also point to "a warm and humid climate," see Soviet Weekly (July 21, 1984).

[43] IC Johnson, "Basinger's Lecture on the Eocene Forests of the Canadian High Arctic," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop 1989:2, p 11.

[44] IC Johnson, "Basinger's Lecture on the Eocene Forests of the Canadian High Arctic," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop 1989:2, p 17. (emphasis added)

[45] Idem, "Anomalous Occurrence of Crocodilia in Eocene Polar Forests," Chronology and Catastrophism Review XIV (1992), p 7; see also ibid, Part Two, Chronology & Catastrophism Review XV (1993), pp 23-26.

[46] New Scientist (December 10, 1987), p 28.

[47] "The Eocene Climate Puzzle," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshiop 1988:1, p28.

[48] "The Eocene Climate Puzzle," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshiop 1988:1, p27.

!qlcLm/8xc.

!qlcLm/8xc. Sat 06 Jun 2020 21:59:05 No.11768913 Report

Quoted By: >>11771457

>>11768910

moar sauces:

[49] IC Johnson, "Basinger's Lecture on the Eocene Forests of the Canadian High Arctic," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop 1989:2, (Part One), p 8.

[50] H Thurston, "Icebound Eden," Equinox (May/June 1986), p 74.

[51] IC Johnson, "Basinger's Lecture on the Eocene Forests of the Canadian High Arctic," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop 1989:2, p 13.

[52] H Thurston, "Icebound Eden," Equinox (May/June 1986), p 81.

[53][54] "The Eocene Climate Puzzle," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshiop 1988:1, p28.

[55] IC Johnson, "Basinger's Lecture on the Eocene Forests of the Canadian High Arctic," Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop 1989:2, p 8.

[56] DH Campbell, "Continental Drift and Plant Distribution," Science (January 16, 1942).

[57] LD Mech, "Life in the High Arctic," National Geographic (June 1988), p 757.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 03:04:39 No.11769636 Report

Quoted By:

>>11768888
Checked.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 03:36:50 No.11769693 Report

Quoted By: >>11770169

>>11768268
This is fucking stupid. How is having to go dormant in darkness any different than shutting down during winter because of cold? This is exactly what happens in many temperate coniferous forests today, and such trees are also often very tall and incredibly long lived.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 09:07:21 No.11770169 Report

Quoted By:

>>11769693
Brainlet detected.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 09:35:04 No.11770218 Report

Quoted By:

>>11768268

Link to where the text is from?

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 19:05:30 No.11771415 Report

Quoted By: >>11771457

>>11768268
How is surviving darkness different from surviving a regular winter? Trees just shut down for a few moths.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 19:13:56 No.11771435 Report

Quoted By: >>11772281

The earth has tended to be warmer than it currently is. Mammals and birbs have thrived because of cooler than average periods.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 19:19:48 No.11771457 Report

Quoted By: >>11771527 >>11772350 >>11773605

>>11768910
>>11768913
With one exception your sources are all over 30 years old.
The Eocene thermal maximum is fairly well understood today is a consequence of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. We studied this CO2 and found it contained a decrease of Carbon-13 which means it had a biological origin. There are only 2 possible sources for this CO2, either it came from forest fires or it came from fossil fuels. Forest fires is unlikely because no mechanism has been found for generating that many forest fires over a short span of time and no ash remains of such forest fires has been found. What's more likely is that a seam of coal or oil positioned itself above a volcanic hot spot or over a plate boundary and was essentially cooked out into the atmosphere.

Some things about the Eocene thermal maximum
We know the temperature based on paleo climatology reached about 8 degrees above normal in degrees C
We know that the tropical zone became and unlivable wasteland as oxygenation in the water dropped to nearly 0 creating large bands of deoxygenated rock.
The arctic became far more livable, almost a jungle by modern standards
Although it had a relatively quick onset (only about 20,000 years) it took many millions to slowly get back to normal.

also this
>>11771415
Given enough time plants and animals can adapt.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 19:38:45 No.11771527 Report

Quoted By: >>11772350

>>11771457
Carbon dating isn't a reliable way to determine the age of anything.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:18:27 No.11772281 Report

Quoted By: >>11774421

>>11771435

!!y9Ak+jN9iwo

!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:38:59 No.11772350 Report

Quoted By: >>11772354 >>11774564

>>11768268
>that pic
>this and that is x millions of years old

>>11768281
>muh periods millions of years ago

>>11771457
>carbondating

>>11771527
Indeed.

*tink, tink, tink*

*Ahem...*

>Regarding Carbon Dating and the Age of the Earth – debunking the meme "we know how old Earth is and we can accurately date stuff" (this isn't a defense of creationism garbage btw):

How old is the Earth and what grounds do we have for accepting that evidence?

The importance of this question lies in the fact that an Earth of immense age is indispensably necessary to the Darwinist theory because genetic mutation and natural selection are processes that are conceived of as working very slowly over hundreds of millions of years. If the Earth were only a few million years old then there simply would not have been enough time for natural selection to work (or so it is claimed).

On this fundamentally important question, the Natural History Museum and all other modern authorities are in complete agreement. The Earth is 4,600 million years old. What is more, different periods of the Earth's history have been characterized by the formation of different kinds of rock containing the fossil remains of distinctive kinds of creature. These different periods have also been dated to give what is usually referred to as the Geological Column of the Earth's history.

By referring to the geological column anyone can tell the age of a rock or fossil that he or she finds. For instance, England's white cliffs consist of chalk dating from the end of the Cretaceous period, which, the column tells us, dates from 65 million years ago.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:40:01 No.11772354 Report

Quoted By: >>11772357 >>11774564

>>11772350
The dates attached to the geological column have been arrived at and refined over the past century or so. The most recent evaluation, and the one quoted in Natural History Museum publications, is that of Van Eysinga published in 1975. This scheme (which is the source of Figure 1) is closely similar to that used in most museums and universities since the early decades of this century, and is based on the pioneering work of Arthur Holmes in the United Kingdom and Henry Faul in the United States. Some minor disagreements may exist among geologists but a very wide measure of agreement exists over the big issue that the earliest rocks of the column are around 4 billion years old, and over most of the details in Figure 1, for example that the Cretaceous period began around 140 million years ago and ended around 65 million years ago.

When I began to research this question a little more closely I uncovered a puzzle. Those experts I referred to and the authoritative textbooks I consulted all told me that modern dating has been accomplished by using radioactive methods and hence was an absolute dating method of a far higher order of accuracy than all previous methods -- most of which relied on calculations involving one or more relative factors. These relative dating methods had relied on such factors as the increasing salinity of the oceans, or the Earth's rate of cooling, and are now considered unreliable. Radioactive dating, though, is used to date the rocks and the fossils they contain directly and hence was welcomed as an absolute method.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:41:03 No.11772357 Report

Quoted By: >>11772359

>>11772354
The puzzle arises because radioactive dating techniques can be applied only to volcanic rocks that contain some radioactive mineral -- the primary rocks of the Earth's crust. But the geological column consists of sedimentary rocks -- rocks formed from sediments laid down on the beds of ancient seas and composed of particles of those primary rocks. So, of course, any age determination made using these particles will be the same as that of the primary rocks from which they were derived. In some common sedimentary rocks, such as chalk or limestone, there are not even particles of the primary rocks present and so radioactive dating cannot be used at all. Happily for English men and women, the white cliffs of Dover are not radioactive.

In The Age of the Earth published by the Institute of Geological Sciences, the position is succinctly explained by John Thackray:

'The only sediments which can be dated directly are those in which a radioactive mineral is formed during diagenesis [laying down] of the sediment, such as the rather uncommon illite shales and glauconitic sandstones; other sediments give only the age of the parent rock from which the mineral grains that make them up are derived.'

How then did Holmes, Faul, and Van Eysinga arrive at the dates attached to the sediments of the geological column?

'The Institute of Geological Sciences explains:

Where lavas or volcanic ashes are interbedded with a sediment of known stratigraphic age, then a date may be given to that stratigraphic division. Where an igneous rock intrudes one sedimentary unit and is blanketed by another, then the sediments may be dated from the igneous rock by inference. The rarity of such cases, together with analytical error inherent in age determination, mean that isotopic ages are unlikely to rival or replace fossils as the most important means of ... correlation.'

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:42:06 No.11772359 Report

Quoted By: >>11772365

>>11772357
It turns out that what has been dated by radioactive decay methods is not the sedimentary rocks or fossils themselves but the isolated intrusion into them of igneous or primary rocks, usually as volcanic material. This has been a rare and purely fortuitous process and one that is unreliable -- so rare and so unreliable that the Institute of Geological Sciences thinks it unlikely to replace or even rival fossils as a method of dating. Nor is this all, for the method depends in turn on a further chain of inference. For the geological column of Van Eysinga is nowhere to be found in nature. It is an imaginary structure that has been synthesized from comparing a stratum of rock in one part of the world with a similar looking stratum in another part of the world ...

Naturalists themselves are often confused in their knowledge of this question. Gavin de Beer, for example, director of the British Museum of Natural History from 1950 to 1960, wrote in the introduction to the museum's guide to evolution, published in 1970, that the rocks forming the geological column had been dated by radioactive methods:

'Estimates of time based on disintegration of radioactive material enable various levels of evolutionary lineages to be dated and the time measured during which certain changes have occurred, thereby providing quantitative evidence of evolution rates and the duration times of genera and species.'

This claim, which is universally believed and taught in schools and universities throughout the world, is entirely false. And when Darwinists speak of absolute dating of the geological column and the fossils it contains by radioactive methods they are quite mistaken, there is nothing absolute about it. In fact the method ought to be referred to as 'comparative dating,' because it dates the sedimentary rocks by inference alone through their relationship to the rare samples of igneous or primary rocks that are being dated.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:43:08 No.11772365 Report

Quoted By: >>11772373 >>11774564

>>11772359
When I pursued this question a little further, I found that there is in reality another factor that has been used to arrive at the age of the geological column and the fossils it contains -- conjecture. This process crept into geological dating at a very early stage when Charles Lyell, the nineteenth century's most prominent geologist and Darwin's mentor in geological matters, attempted to date the end of the Cretaceous period by reference to how long he thought it would have taken the shellfish (whose fossils are found in later beds) to have evolved into their modern descendants. Lyell estimated that the Cretaceous ended 80 million years ago -- not too far from today's accepted figure of 65 million, plus or minus 3 million.

According to Harold Levin of Washington University, 'By comparing the amount of evolution exhibited by the marine molluscs in the various series of the Tertiary System with the amount that had occurred since the beginning of the Pleistocene Ice Age, Lyell estimated that 80 million years had elapsed since the beginning of the Cenozoic.'

Levin adds that, 'He came astonishingly close to the mark.' In fact, it is not at all astonishing when you know that today's accepted date has been derived not from an absolute, independent source but from conjectures including Lyell's.

The kind of surmise used to supplement the relative dates yielded by radioactive dating includes assumptions about the rates at which sediments are laid down on the bottoms of lakes, seashores, and ocean floors; estimates of the rates at which forests are turned into coal deposits; and estimates of the rates at which certain very long-lived families of creatures might have evolved. But although these conjectures are embodied in the modern view of the age of geological deposits, they are rarely if ever disclosed in geological or biological textbooks, and they are rarely exposed to debate.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:44:58 No.11772373 Report

Quoted By: >>11772377

>>11772365
Curiously, too, no geologist seems to have checked out the geological column dates with an electronic calculator on a commonsense basis. Let us go back to the illustration of the column in Figure 1 and look again at the thickness of the rocks in each period compared with the length of time assigned to those periods. Note that there is a remarkable consistency between assigned age and thickness of deposit. For instance the Cretaceous period is said to have lasted 65 million years and is 15,000 meters thick -- an average annual rate of deposition of 0.2 millimeters. Now look at the Silurian period: this, too, yields an average rate of deposition of about 0.2 millimeters per year -- as does the Ordovician, the Devonian, the Carboniferous, and the rest. It is only when we come to relatively modern times in the Cenozoic era that rates of deposition vary much, and here they appear to speed up slightly.

This is a very remarkable finding. One naturally expects Uniformitarian geology to favor uniformity, but this is too much of a good thing. Throughout widely changing climatic conditions, advancing and retreating oceans, droughts, and Ice Ages, the rate of sedimentation appears to remain amazingly constant regardless throughout the thousands of millions of years that are said to have elapsed. The presumed rate of deposition itself -- about the thickness of a human hair in a year -- is a matter looked at in more detail later. But it is worth pausing in passing to note that such a slow rate would be quite incapable of burying and fossilizing entire forests, dinosaurs, or even a medium-sized tadpole.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:46:00 No.11772377 Report

Quoted By: >>11772382

>>11772373
Of course, all these sediments, with their time capsule contents of fossilized creatures from the past, were laid down long after the Earth was formed and long after the decisive event took place in the chain of evolution -- the origin of life itself in ancient seas. It is the rock from which those later sediments were derived -- the primary bedrock of the Earth's crust -- in which we are chiefly interested if we wish to date the Earth.

The key question remains: How old is the Earth? And to examine the answer that has come to be accepted on this score, we must look more closely at radioactive methods of dating.

In the years following the second world war, American chemist Willard Libby made a discovery that won him the Nobel prize for chemistry, which revolutionized the study of the Earth's prehistory, but which ultimately was to provide unexpectedly disconcerting evidence on the age of the Earth itself.

Libby's discovery was the now-famous radiocarbon method of determining the age of organic remains, which gave archeologists their first practical tool for routinely dating the past. At the time of its discovery and its first application to archeological sites around the world in 1949, the radiocarbon method appeared to confirm that humankind's past was indeed of great antiquity and that geologists and evolutionists had been perfectly justified in continually pushing further back in time the dawn of humanity.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:47:19 No.11772382 Report

Quoted By: >>11772384 >>11774564

>>11772377
Field archeologists in the 1950s, applying the new power given them by chemistry, confidently assigned absolute dates to early human prehistoric settlements with a precision that must have astounded their teachers of a generation before. The city of Jericho was said to have been a thriving human settlement 11,000 years ago, while Neolithic sites in Russia and Africa were dated as being well over 50,000 years old. The author of Encyclopaedia Britannica's article on prehistoric Mrica, for instance, says 'Radiocarbon dating suggests that the Earlier Stone Age may have lingered on until about 55,000 B.c.'

The readiness of science today to accept a great antiquity for the Earth and humankind contrasts sharply with the attitude of scientists little more than a century ago. This radical change in outlook involved the overthrow of the old geological belief in a catastrophic origin for the rocks of the Earth's crust and its replacement by the modern uniformitarian theory -- the idea that the rocks have formed slowly over millions or billions of years.

At the time that Darwin set sail for South America in the Beagle in 1831, the Earth's age was reckoned merely in thousands of years, and not many thousands at that. One well-known early attempt to date the Earth is that of Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, a noted Bible scholar who deduced through careful analysis of biblical texts that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.. The Archbishop's finding was published in 1650 and soon after was added as a marginal notation to the Book of Genesis in the Authorized Version of the Bible where it remained until Victorian times, and can still be found occasionally today.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:48:28 No.11772384 Report

Quoted By: >>11772388

>>11772382
A contemporary of the Archbishop, Dr. John Lightfoot, Master of St Catherine's College and Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, was able to endorse this date and indeed refine it with astounding precision. 'Man was created by the Trinity,' wrote Dr. Lightfoot, 'on October 23rd 4004 B.C. at nine o'clock in the morning.' As Ronald Millar has pointed out, only a Cambridge Vice Chancellor would have the audacity to assign the date and time of the creation to the beginning of the academic year.

A number of the influential geologists in Darwin's day were also clergymen whose religious views strongly influenced their scientific beliefs. This religious complexion to geology in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -- an otherwise flourishing era for rationalist thinking in science -- influenced theories of rock formation and the age of the Earth in two important ways.

First, widespread acceptance of the biblical creation story contained in Genesis meant that the cleric-geologists neglected to question how the Earth began or how life originated because they believed they already had the answers to these questions. And second, the creation story constituted a ready-made theory to accommodate all their scientific observations (often meticulously detailed) thereby stifling the formation of any new theory when they discovered new evidence in the field.

When these researchers found thousands of feet of compacted mudlike sediments containing the bones of dead animals, the discovery was taken as "clear evidence" of Noah's flood described in the Bible. Hence the prevailing geological theory of the pre-Darwinian era was that of catastrophism -- the doctrine that the rocks of the Earth's crust were formed more or less simultaneously as a result of a divinely ordained Great Flood.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:49:30 No.11772388 Report

Quoted By: >>11772392

>>11772384
Some of the attempts by pre-nineteenth century geologists to fit their observations to biblical teaching appear obviously contrived and rather absurd from our perspective today. Swiss naturalist Johann Scheuchzer, who discovered some early vertebrate remains of a salamander around 1720, exhibited them widely as the remains of the imaginatively named Homo diluvii testis -- Man, a witness to the flood. (Some believe that Scheuchzer was seeking to turn an honest copper or two with his discovery, in which case we must blame the gullibility of his customers rather than the inadequacy of eighteenth century science.)

In general, though, the observations of nature made at this time were models of scientific accuracy and would do credit to any modern researcher. Unfortunately when the theory of catastrophism fell into disrepute after Darwin, many of the observations of the cleric-geologists were rejected as religiously inspired prescientific thinking: observations that did indeed support a catastrophic origin for many rocks. ... one observation of this type that was well known in Darwin's day may be mentioned now by way of example: the occurrence of 'graveyards' of millions of land-dwelling (not marine) creatures who suffered death simultaneously.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:50:32 No.11772392 Report

Quoted By: >>11772398 >>11774564

>>11772388
Darwin and his supporters realized at an early stage that their theory demanded vast reaches of geological time to support the supposed microscopic changes in form from one generation to another. Equally, evolutionists stood in need of a geological basis for this great antiquity -- a mechanism that worked slowly and gradually rather than one that worked suddenly and all at once. They rejected catastrophism and instead found the mechanism they sought in an idea taking shape among the new generation of secular geologists who asserted that sedimentary rocks (that is, fossilbearing rocks) were formed slowly by the same processes that can be seen on the ocean bottom today: the deposition of silt and sand that becomes cemented and compacted over millions of years to form successive strata of rock.

Under the reassuring-sounding label of uniformitarianism these ideas were actively promoted by secular geologists like James Hutton and later Charles Lyell, who was Darwin's coach on geological issues. The uniformitarian doctrine is summed up in the famous phrase 'the present is the key to the past' -- a concept eagerly accepted by Darwinists as ready-made for their theory and one expounded on at length in Lyell's Principles of Geology, the primary geological work of the century, published between 1824 and 1833.

The important point to note here is that it was the imperative need for great antiquity that deposed catastrophism, rather than any new scientific discoveries or observations; it was a new way of looking at things, not a new piece of knowledge. But, superficially, the change in view seemed to be a shift away from naive belief in biblical tales of creation and flood, and toward a newly established scientific viewpoint. And those who continued to argue the case for a catastrophic origin of rocks were seen as merely making a last-ditch attempt to rescue the religious doctrine of the creation as told in Genesis.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:51:34 No.11772398 Report

Quoted By: >>11772402

>>11772392
Darwinists needed time, and lots of it: uniformitarians had the geological theory that demonstrated great antiquity. Geologists needed a firm foundation for the relative dating and correlation of the many sediments piled one on another in the past-the many strata of the geological column: Darwinists were able to supply the key to the stratigraphical succession of the rocks by comparative anatomy of the fossils contained in those strata, interpreted along evolutionist lines. Thus an unusual academic interdependence sprang up between the two sciences that continues to this day. A geologist wishing to date a rock stratum would ask an evolutionist's opinion on the fossils it contained. An evolutionist having difficulty dating a fossil species would turn to the geologist for help. Fossils were used to date rocks: rocks were used to date fossils.

A modern example of paleontologists using fossils to date rocks in a circular way is provided by one of the most famous of all North American dinosaur discovery sites: the rocks at Como Bluffs, Wyoming. I only regret that this example involves one of today's most innovative researchers, Robert Bakker of the University of Colorado. It was at Como Bluffs in the 1870s and 1880s that paleontologists such as Edward Cope and O. C. Marsh discovered more than 120 new species of dinosaur, including diplodocus and stegasaurus. The many strata exposed in the steep cliff at this seminal site have subsequently yielded many more specimens and they are still worked today by scientists from many universities.

Of the site, Robert Bakker says:

At a place like Como Bluffs you have layer after layer -- it's like getting a burst of frames from a motion picture of how the dinosaurs came, flourished and went extinct. At any one place in the world, you don't have the whole history of dinosaurs, in fact you don't have the whole history of one family of dinosaurs, you just have a little burst of fossils.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:52:37 No.11772402 Report

Quoted By: >>11772407 >>11774564

>>11772398
We don't yet have radioactive beds that can give us a nice hard number [on the age of the deposit]. But by comparing the fossils we get at the bottom of the section and at the top, it's about 10 million years. So all of this history is played out roughly over about 2 million dinosaur generations, 10 million chronological years.

Ironically, not only is there no radioactive basis for the dating of Como Bluffs, there is, as Robert Bakker says, not even a complete history of a single dinosaur family at the site. Yet we are given the confident assertion concerning the number of dinosaur generations and the number of years to which this sequence is equivalent, with no solid physical basis. No other scientific discipline would be permitted even to consider such procedures, but when paleontologists date rocks by means of fossils, they do so with the authority of Charles Darwin himself.

This circular process ought to have aroused suspicion, if not among its practitioners then among scientists of related disciplines. In fact it went unremarked and unchallenged because the discovery and introduction of methods of dating based on radioactive decay in the early years of this century appeared amply to vindicate the Darwinist-uniformitarian view and to justify their interdependence.

In the last two decades, however, further research into these technical methods of dating has revealed a number of worrying inconsistencies in the now orthodox view of the Earth's age: radioactive dating techniques are far less reliable than was previously thought; the Earth could be much younger than has been supposed by Darwinists; and nothing like the billions of years required by evolution theory have elapsed since the Earth's formation.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:53:39 No.11772407 Report

Quoted By: >>11772411 >>11773041

>>11772402
The first clue that something may be amiss with the view of uniformitarian geology and its claim for an old Earth came paradoxically from the technique that seemed most to support that view -- Willard Libby's radiocarbon dating method. To appreciate exactly why the radiocarbon technique has had such unexpected consequences, it is necessary first to look at just how the technique was supposed to work.

Radiocarbon -- radioactive carbon 14 -- is a form of carbon created in the upper atmosphere by the bombardment of cosmic particles from space. As radioactive carbon dioxide it permeates the atmosphere and passes into the bodies of plants and animals through the food chain. To any plant or animal, carbon 14 is indistinguishable from the common carbon (carbon 12) which occurs naturally on Earth. Radiocarbon is relatively rare, so of the total amount of carbon in the body of a plant or animal only a minute fraction is radiocarbon. What makes this tiny fraction useful for dating, argued Libby, is that the proportion of radiocarbon is the same for all living animals and plants the world over, and something that can readily be measured.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:54:41 No.11772411 Report

Quoted By: >>11772413 >>11774564

>>11772407
Radiocarbon begins to decay as soon as it is formed. When a quantity of radiocarbon is produced in the atmosphere, half of that amount will have decayed away (becoming nitrogen gas) in some 5,700 years. Half the remainder will decay in a further 5,700 years, and so on, until an immeasurably small residue remains. Once a plant or animal dies, it ceases to take in radiocarbon from the 'terrestrial reservoir' or outside world, so the amount of radiocarbon in its body begins to dwindle through decay while the ordinary carbon remains unchanged. So, 5,700 years after a tree dies, it contains only half the proportion of radiocarbon to common carbon that exists in a living tree, and in the living world in general. After a total of 11,400 years, or two half-lives, it will contain only one quarter the proportion in the outside world, and so on. After about five half-lives, or roughly 30,000 years, only an immeasurably small residue remains and so the radiocarbon test is only good for dating remains younger than this natural 'ceiling.'

To date an organic find (the test only works, of course, on the remains of once-living things, such as bones in a Neolithic burial, or Roman fence posts) it is only necessary to measure the amount of remnant radioactive carbon with a suitable counter and hence deduce when the specimen ceased to take in radiocarbon -- when it died.

The great value of the test is that only a tiny fragment of an irreplaceable papyrus or rare skull is needed because it is the proportion of radiocarbon to ordinary carbon that is measured and compared with the proportions that exist in the terrestrial reservoir or living world today. In the end the whole technique rests, therefore, on knowing with some precision the ratio of radiocarbon to common carbon in the terrestrial reservoir today, and it was for making these measurements as well as developing the dating technique that Libby was awarded the Nobel prize.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:55:43 No.11772413 Report

Quoted By: >>11772417 >>11774564

>>11772411
There is just one further factor of some importance for the test to work properly: the standard mix of radiocarbon to ordinary carbon in the terrestrial reservoir must always have been the same throughout the lifetime of the test subject and in the years since its death. Take the case of archeologists setting out to determine the age of a Neolithic woman whose burial chamber they discover. If there had been a lot more carbon 14 around during the life of this early woman, the reading from her bones will be falsely inflated -- she will appear a much more recent burial than she really was. Had there been a lot less radiocarbon around during her life, then the reading will appear falsely diminished and she will appear much older.

At the time that Libby and his co-workers were developing the new technique, in the 1940s, they had every reason to believe that the amount of carbon 14 in the world could not possibly have varied during the time that humankind had been on Earth simply because the Earth is of immense age, some 4,600 million years old. This great age stamps the radiocarbon technique with the seal of respectability because of what Libby called the 'equilibrium value' for the radiocarbon reservoir.

After the Earth was formed and acquired an atmosphere, there would be a 30,000 year transition period during which carbon 14 would be building up. At the end of that period, the amount of carbon 14 created by cosmic radiation will be balanced by the amount of carbon 14 decaying away to almost zero. To use Libby's terminology, at the end of 30,000 years, the terrestrial radiocarbon reservoir will have reached a steady state.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:56:45 No.11772417 Report

Quoted By: >>11772419 >>11774564

>>11772413
Since the Earth, according to uniformitarian geology, is many, many times older than the 30,000 years needed to fill up the reservoir, then radiocarbon must unquestionably have attained equilibrium billions of years ago, and must have been constantly so throughout the few million years allotted to human history. To test this essential part of the theory, Libby made measurements of both the rate of formation and the rate of decay of radiocarbon. He found a considerable discrepancy in his measurements indicating that, apparently, radiocarbon was being created in the atmosphere somewhere around 25 percent faster than it was becoming extinct. Since this result was inexplicable by any conventional scientific means, Libby put the discrepancy down to experimental error.

During the 1960s, Libby's experiments were repeated by chemists who had been able to refine their techniques after a decade or so of experience. The experiments demand almost heroic measures since the amounts of radiation involved are very small (only a few atomic disintegrations per second) and because of the need to screen out all other sources of radiation that would contaminate the result. The new experiments, though, revealed that the discrepancy observed by Libby was not merely experimental error -- it did exist. It was found by Richard Lingenfelter that 'There is strong indication, despite the large errors, that the present natural production rate exceeds the natural decay rate by as much as 25 percent ... It appears that equilibrium in the production and decay of carbon 14 may not be maintained in detail.'

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:57:46 No.11772419 Report

Quoted By: >>11772421 >>11774564

>>11772417
Other researchers have confirmed this finding, including Hans Suess of the University of Southern California, writing in the Journal of Geophysical Research and V. R. Switzer writing in Science.

Melvin Cook, Professor of Metallurgy at Utah University, has reviewed the data of Suess and Lingenfelter and has reached the conclusion that the present rate of formation of carbon 14 is 18.4 atoms per gram per minute and the rate of decay 13.3 atoms per gram per minute, a ratio indicating that formation exceeds decay by some 38 percent.

The meaning of this discovery is described as follows by Cook: 'This result has two alternate implications: either the atmosphere is for one reason or another in a transient build up stage as regards Carbon 14 ... or else something is wrong in one or another of the basic postulates of the radiocarbon dating method.'

Cook has gone one step further by taking the latest measured figures on radiocarbon formation and decay and calculating from them back to the point at which there would have been zero radiocarbon. In doing so, he is in effect using the radiocarbon technique to date the Earth's own atmosphere. And the resulting calculation shows that, using Libby's own data, the age of the atmosphere is around 10,000 years!

To anyone who, like me, was brought up on a diet of uniformitarian geology and Darwinian theory and to any high-school pupil or college student who opens a standard geology textbook, the suggestion that life on Earth may have a history as short as 10,000 years inevitably appears preposterous. Surely, the radiocarbon method has been tested against artifacts of known age and has been thoroughly vindicated? Surely the technique has been widely adopted in archeology with excellent results? And surely any fundamental flaw in the methods would have been discovered years ago?

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:58:47 No.11772421 Report

Quoted By: >>11772425 >>11774564

>>11772419
It is perfectly true that radiocarbon dating has been tried on objects whose age is independently known from archeological sources and scored some impressive early successes. One of the very first artifacts to be tested was a wooden boat from an Egyptian pharaonic tomb whose age was independently known to be 3,750 years before the present. Radiocarbon assay produced the date of between 3,441 and 3,801 years, a minimum error of only 51 years. But after this promising start, the method quickly ran into difficulties. Anomalous dates were produced from later assays that showed that some living things may interact with parts of the reservoir that have been anomalously depleted of carbon 14 and thus appear to be much older than they really are.

In one of the most recent cases of anomalous dating, rock paintings found in the South African bush in 1991 were analyzed by Oxford University's radiocarbon accelerator unit which dated them as being around 1,200 years old. This finding was significant because it meant the paintings would have been the first bushman painting found in open country. However, publicity of the find attracted the attention of Joan Ahrens, a Capetown resident, who recognized the paintings as being produced by her in art classes and later stolen from her garden by vandals. The significance of incidents such as this is that mistakes can only be discovered in those rare cases where chance grants us some external method of checking the dating technique. Where no such external verification exists, we have simply to accept the verdict of carbon dating.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Sun 07 Jun 2020 23:59:48 No.11772425 Report

Quoted By: >>11772427 >>11774564

>>11772421
The position resulting from these anomalous discoveries was summarized by Hole and Heizer in their Introduction to Prehistoric Archaeology:

'For a number of years it was thought that the possible errors ... were of relatively minor consequence, but more recent intensive research into radiocarbon dates, compared with calendar dates, shows that the natural concentration of Carbon 14 in the atmosphere has varied sufficiently to affect dates significantly for certain periods. Because scientists have not been able to predict the amount of variation theoretically, it has been necessary to find a parallel dating method of absolute accuracy to assess the correlation between Carbon 14 dates and the calendar.'

The parallel dating method turned to in order to assess radiocarbon dating involves that strange tree the bristlecone pine, which grows at high altitudes in the mountains of California and Nevada and is the oldest living thing on Earth -- some specimens said to be 5,000 years old.

The bristlecone pine has been exploited by Charles Ferguson of Arizona University to develop the science of dendrochronology -- dating by tree rings. The tree is useful here because it lives to a great age and certain 'signature' sequences of tree rings are said to be characteristic of specific years before the present, enabling a younger tree to be correlated with older trees (including dead ones) to stretch the tree-ring chronology further and further back. Cross-dating from one core sample to another by means of such signatures enabled Ferguson to construct a master chronology that spans a total of 8,200 years before the present. This has been used to check up on radiocarbon dating variations.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:00:51 No.11772427 Report

Quoted By: >>11772430 >>11774564

>>11772425
Hans Suess of the University of California in San Diego has radiocarbon dated the bristlecone pine samples of the master chronology and from this a table of deviation has been drawn up which in theory allows the inaccuracies of the radiocarbon method to be corrected for up to around 10,000 years ago.

Radiocarbon dating's inventor Willard Libby did not at first think that large deviations were possible. 'When we developed the radiocarbon dating method,' he said, 'we had no choice than to assume that the cosmic rays had remained constant, though obviously we hadn't the slightest evidence that this was so. But now we know what the variations were.'

Hans Suess was able to show precisely how variations in the amount of cosmic radiation changed the amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere and his table indicates that by about 5,000 B.C., radiocarbon-derived dates are around 1,000 years too young.

'Whatever the source of radiocarbon,' says Libby, 'it mixes very rapidly with life on earth so we have a firm belief that the calibrations with the bristlecone pine apply worldwide.'

Are archeologists happy with this result? In fact they appear rather confused by it. Before the bristlecone pine amendments, the dates given by radiocarbon dating had confirmed the widely held belief of diffusionists -- that culture had spread from Egypt and the Middle East via Mycenae and Crete westward into Europe and then Britain. However, the new chronology indicates that, for instance, the island of Malta was carving spiral decorations and erecting megalithic structures before the supposed cradle civilizations further east. Many archeologists are unhappy about this, but the chronology now has the authority of both Libby and the dendrochronological corrections of Suess's bristlecone pine deviation tables.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:01:22 No.11772428 Report

Quoted By:

spamming just puts you into the schizo bin

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:01:52 No.11772430 Report

Quoted By: >>11772433 >>11774564

>>11772427
A further difficulty has more recently been introduced into the controversy because the fundamental principle on which dendrochronology is based -- that a tree ring forms each year -- has been questioned. R. W Fairbridge, writing on dendrochronology in Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry on the Holocene epoch says:

'As with Palynology, certain pitfalls have been discovered in tree-ring analysis. Sometimes, as in a very severe season, a growth ring may not form. In certain latitudes, the tree ring's growth correlates with moisture, but in others it may be correlated with temperature. From the climatic viewpoint these two parameters are often inversely related in different regions.'

It is also possible for two tree rings to grow in a single year, when growth begins in spring but is later arrested by a period of unseasonal frosts and later starts up again.

These climatic variations presumably mean that a fresh set of correction tables will be needed to modify the bristlecone pine dates, although no one has yet devised a method of calibration for such tables. But whatever the outcome of the debate between archeologists and radiocarbon chemists, the key question for chemistry is how to explain the observed discrepancy between the rate of production of carbon 14 and its rate of decay in the atmosphere. Cook has suggested that one possible explanation of the discrepancy is that the atmosphere is still in nonequilibrium because the required 30,000 years have not yet elapsed since it was first formed.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:02:53 No.11772433 Report

Quoted By: >>11772435 >>11774564

>>11772430
Adherents of the old-earth theory have responded first by seeking to minimize the discrepancy -- claiming that it is 'around 10 percent' when it is really as great as 38 percent -- and second by saying that the proportion of radiocarbon in the terrestrial reservoir may fluctuate over time and that we are currently going through a build-up phase. There is no scientific evidence to support this view but to someone who already believes in an old earth, the conclusion seems self-evidently more reasonable.

But what reasonable alternative could there be? How could the Earth possibly be merely thousands of years old? How could science have gone so far wrong?

One day, more than twenty years ago, I picked up an apparently dull geology textbook and found my attention arrested by a single sentence. The book was called Prehistory and Earth Models and was by the professor of metallurgy at Utah University, Dr. Melvin Cook. Cook, a physical chemist, is a world expert on high explosives and his textbook on explosives for mining is still a classic work of reference. Professors of metallurgy do not usually stir up trouble in the academic world, but what I had read in his geology book was more explosive than any text on TNT.

In his preface Cook wrote: 'An attempt to publish a manuscript giving direct evidence for the short-time chronometry of the atmosphere and oceans entitled 'Anomalous Chronometry in the Atmosphere and Hydrosphere,' not unexpectedly nor without some cause, met with considerable opposition and was not published.'

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:03:54 No.11772435 Report

Quoted By: >>11772436 >>11774564

>>11772433
Who on earth had prevented Dr. Cook from publishing his paper? I wondered. And what could a metallurgy professor have to say that was so heretical that someone wanted to prevent its publication? I found that his book contained scientific evidence and reasoned argument which showed that something was terribly wrong with the orthodox scientific view of methods of dating. The most widely used methods, such as uranium-lead and potassium-argon, had been found to be seriously flawed, not merely in practice but in principle. In addition, the methods yielded dates so discordant as to make them unreliable.

Cook showed for example that if you used the uranium-decay method on the rocks of the crust you got the conventionally accepted age of over four thousand million years. But if you used the selfsame method on the atmosphere, you got an age of only a few hundred thousand years. He also showed that the entire amount of 'radiogenic' lead in the world's two largest uranium deposits could be entirely modern. Clearly something was wrong.

When I dug deeper, I found that Cook was not a lone voice. Other papers by scientists in reputable scientific journals expressed similar doubts and findings. Funkhouser and Naughton at the Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics used the potassium-argon method to date volcanic rocks from Mount Kilauea and got ages of up to 3 thousand million years -- when the rocks are known to have been formed in a modern eruption in 1801. McDougall at the Australian National University found ages of up to 465,000 years for lava in New Zealand that is independently known to be less than 1,000 years old.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:05:00 No.11772436 Report

Quoted By: >>11772439 >>11774564

>>11772435
I eventually came to the alarming realization that although radioactive decay is the most stable source of chronometry we have today, it is badly compromised as a historical timekeeper, because it is not the rate of decay that is being measured but the amount of decay products left. For this reason, all radioactive methods of geochronometry are deeply flawed and cannot be relied on with any real confidence in this application.

Earlier, I asked, How could science have gone so far wrong? The answer turns out to be that it is not science which has gone wrong, merely those scientists seeking to defend a single idea -- Darwinian evolution. Science has proposed many methods of geochronometry -- measuring the Earth's age -- all of which are subject to some uncertainties, for reasons I shall describe in a moment. But of these many methods, only one technique -- that of the radioactive decay of uranium and similar elements -- yields an age for the Earth of billions of years. And it is this one method that has been enthusiastically promoted by Darwinists and uniformitarian geologists, while all other methods have been neglected.

So successful has this promotional campaign been that today almost everyone, including scientists working in other fields, has been led to believe that radioactive dating is the only method of geochronometry worth considering, and that it is well-nigh unassailable because of the universal constancy of radioactive decay. In fact, none of these widely held beliefs is supported by the evidence.

To appreciate how and why radiometric methods are flawed, first look a little more closely at the problems which confront the geologist attempting to measure the Earth's age.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:06:02 No.11772439 Report

Quoted By: >>11772444 >>11774564

>>11772436
All methods of measuring time, whether for domestic or scientific purposes, rely on the same basic principle: monitoring the rate of some constant natural process. Today our most sophisticated chronometric methods involve the rate at which a quartz crystal vibrates when an electric potential is applied to it, and the rate at which radioactive elements decay -- said to be the most constant source of all.

But having some readily available process to measure is not enough by itself. To measure elapsed time accurately we must be sure that the process does in fact remain constant, even when we are not watching. You must know the starting value of the clock -- how much water was in your water clock to begin with or how tall your candle was before it was lit. And you must be sure that some external factor cannot interfere with the process while it is in operation, for instance, that a temporary power cut does not stop your electric clock while you are out walking your dog.

All these conditions apply to measuring time today. When it comes to the science of geochronometry, the process we choose will have started in prehistoric times, which we have no method of directly observing and verifying. This means we must make sure as far as possible that our three conditions were met in the past as well as in the present -- and it is here that our problems begin.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:07:03 No.11772444 Report

Quoted By: >>11772447 >>11774564

>>11772439
Suppose, for instance, we were to take the increasing salinity of the oceans as a means of finding out how old the Earth is (a method actually proposed in 1898 by Irish geologist John Joly). On the face of it this is a promising method, since it can be assumed that initially the oceans consisted of fresh water, and the present-day accumulation of salt is due to erosion of land masses by rainfall and the subsequent transport of dissolved salt into the seas by way of the world's rivers. Even more encouraging is the fact that the rate of erosion of the land by rainfall is surprisingly constant each year -- about 540 million tons of salt a year. All that would be necessary is to measure the present-day concentration of salt in the sea (32 grams per litre); calculate from this the total amount in all the oceans (about 5 x 1016 tons); and divide this total by the annual amount of salt deposited to get the age of the Earth in years.

Using this method, Joly came up with an age of 100 million years. Unfortunately, when we apply the three conditions mentioned earlier to this method its shortcomings quickly become obvious. First, we cannot be sure that the annual runoff of dissolved salt has always been constant. Indeed there is good reason to suppose that climatic conditions have been very different in the past -- with ice ages and major droughts for instance -- and these conditions might have had an effect that is incalculable.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:08:04 No.11772447 Report

Quoted By: >>11772452 >>11774564

>>11772444
Second, we cannot be quite sure that there was zero salt in the sea to begin with. Initially, some salt might have been present, though no one can say how much, if any. (Recent research in the Atlantic suggests that salts may have been extruded into ocean basins from the molten magma beneath the crust.) And third, it turns out that an apparently constant process is interfered with by external factors. Large amounts of salt are recirculated into the atmosphere, and recent evidence suggests that the salt in the sea might actually be in a steady state -- as fast as salt is deposited in the sea, it is picked up in the air and redeposited on land again. A large quantity of salt is evaporated by biological processes and still more is incorporated into bottom sediments through chemical processes, spoiling our 'clock.'

All methods of measuring the age of the Earth are subject, to some extent, to the same defects -- quite simply, no one was there at the time to check up on our three criteria. The technique used by uniformitarian geologists to arrive at the tremendous age of 4,600 million years for the Earth is usually referred to simply as the 'uranium' or 'uranium-lead' method. Sometimes it is popularly referred to merely as radioactive or radiometric dating. The technique in question covers a family of methods involving the radioactive decay of a number of different metallic elements with very long half-lives (they stay radioactive for very long periods). These elements include uranium and its sister element thorium, which both decay into helium and lead; rubidium, which decays into strontium; and potassium, which decays into argon and calcium.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:09:06 No.11772452 Report

Quoted By: >>11772457 >>11774564

>>11772447
The basic principle is this: over very long periods of time uranium spontaneously decays into lead and helium gas. The rate of decay is remarkably constant. The atoms of the uranium are unstable and periodically throw out an alpha particle, which is the nucleus of an atom of helium. It is impossible to tell in advance when any particular atom will break apart in this way since the process occurs at random. But in any substantial mass of the mineral there will be many billions of atoms, and with very large numbers of events the 'law of large numbers' operates to produce a statistically predictable result.

The important part of the theory is that the kind of lead into which uranium eventually decays is chemically distinctive from common lead already present in the rocks, and is referred to as radiogenic lead, a daughter product of the decay process. Common lead is an isotope called lead 204, while the decay product of uranium 238 is lead 206. In order to date a rock deposit a sample is taken and the amount of radioactive uranium, together with the amount of radiogenic lead it contains, is accurately assayed in the laboratory. Since the rate of decay is known from modern measurements, it is possible to calculate directly how long the uranium has been decaying -- how old the deposit is -- by how much radiogenic lead it has turned into.

The half-life of uranium 238 (one of the principal isotopes used) has been calculated to be 4,500 million years. To take a simplistic example, if the assay showed that a deposit was composed of half uranium 238 and half its daughter product lead 206, then one would draw the conclusion that the deposit was 4,500 million years old. (This, incidentally, is the average figure that is found for the Earth's crust although the figure is arrived at by extrapolation rather than direct measurement.)

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:10:13 No.11772457 Report

Quoted By: >>11772461 >>11774564

>>11772452
On the face of it, uranium decay seems an ideal method of geochronometry, and above scientific suspicion. But, as in the case of radiocarbon dating, research in recent decades has begun to cast serious doubts on its reliability.

The first criterion for any method of geochronometry is that we must know the starting value of the process we are measuring; we must have a point of departure, or reference point, from which to make our calculations. On the face of it, uranium decay fulfills this requirement since the type of lead which results is said to be uniquely formed as a by-product of this process. If radiogenic lead -- lead 206 and lead 207 from uranium, and lead 208 from thorium -- really is uniquely formed as the end product of disintegration, then it is perfectly reasonable to suppose, as adherents of radioactive dating do, that there was zero radiogenic lead in the rocks of the Earth's crust when they first formed, and so we have a reliable starting point for our calculations. The same argument can be used to make us reasonably certain that no radiogenic lead could have intruded into the rocks by some other means, thus distorting the effects of the decay process.

But things are by no means as simple as they seem when investigated a little more closely. Cook has suggested there is another, and quite separate, mechanism by which common lead can be transmuted into a form which, on assay, will be indistinguishable from 'radiogenic' lead. This transmutation can occur through the capture of free neutrons -- atomic particles with enough energy to transmute common lead into so-called radiogenic lead. Where, though, could such a source of free neutrons be found? The answer is in a radioactive ore deposit such as uranium, where they occur through spontaneous fission!

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:11:15 No.11772461 Report

Quoted By: >>11772467 >>11774564

>>11772457
In other words, the very process being measured can be moonlighting at another job. As well as spontaneously decaying into radiogenic lead, it is also making available a supply of particles which are simultaneously converting common lead into another isotope which, on being assayed, will be indistinguishable from a radiogenic product of alpha decay. Significantly, this is a mechanism that would tip our measurements in favor of an 'old' Earth. Too much 'radiogenic' lead would lead us to imagine that the process has been going on for much longer than it actually has.

In the neutron capture process, the isotopic values of lead would be systematically changed: lead 206 would be converted into lead 207, and lead 207 into lead 208. Interestingly, lead 208 usually constitutes more than half the lead present in any given deposit. This is normally interpreted as meaning that thorium, the parent element of lead 208, was very common in the deposit in question, although it could also be interpreted as indicating that free neutron capture is a far more important process in lead isotope formation than radioactive decay.

In Prehistory and Earth Models, Cook examined the lead content of two of the world's largest uranium ore deposits -- in Zaire and Canada. He found that they contained practically no Thorium 232. However they do contain significant amounts of lead 208. This could have been derived only from lead 207 by neutron capture, says Cook, while all the so-called radiogenic lead can be accounted for on the same basis and the mineral deposits could be essentially of modern origin.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:12:16 No.11772467 Report

Quoted By: >>11772470 >>11774564

>>11772461
Because Cook is a creationist as well as a scientist and because creationists have unfortunately used Cook's findings as ammunition for their cause, strenuous attempts have been made by some scientists, such as G. Brent Dalrymple, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, to discredit him and his research. So far, however, neither Dalrymple nor any other dating advocate has offered a satisfactory explanation for the finding that there is practically no thorium 232 in the world's two largest uranium deposits, but that there are significant quantities of lead 208.

Dalrymple and others have asserted that the level of free neutrons available is too low to be capable of causing any significant change in the ratio of lead isotopes in deposits such as these. But if that assertion is correct then it becomes impossible to account on any rational basis for the quantities of lead 208 in Zaire and Canada.

So uranium decay fails the most important criterion for a reliable method of geochronometry. But it also fails a second criterion -- that we must be reasonably sure no outside agency can interfere with the smooth running of our chosen process. Uranium does not naturally occur in metallic form but as uranium oxide. This material is highly soluble in water and is known to be moved away from its original deposit in large quantities by ground waters. The type of effect this has on dating is unpredictable since some parts of a mineral deposit can be unnaturally enriched while others are unnaturally depleted.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:13:18 No.11772470 Report

Quoted By: >>11772474 >>11774564

>>11772467
There is one further discovery relating to uranium dating that is of considerable relevance to attempts to measure the age of the Earth. As mentioned earlier, the final disintegration products of the decay process are two, not only lead but also helium gas. Like the lead which results from the decay process, the helium is also a radiogenic daughter product with an atomic weight of 4. In fact almost the entire amount of helium in the Earth's atmosphere is believed to be radiogenic helium, formed during the decay process throughout most of the Earth's history.

Now, if the uranium-lead dating technique were reliable, then the amount of this radiogenic helium in the atmosphere would yield a date for the Earth's age consonant with that yielded by measuring the amount of radiogenic lead in the crust. In fact, the dates are so different as to be irreconcilable.

If the Earth were 4,600 million years old, then there would be roughly 10,000 billion tons of radiogenic helium 4 in the atmosphere. Actually, there are only around 3.5 billion tons presentseveral thousand times less than there should be (0.035 percent to be precise).

Writing in Nature on the 'mystery' of the Earth's missing radiogenic helium, Melvin Cook says,

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:14:27 No.11772474 Report

Quoted By: >>11772479 >>11774564

>>11772470
'At the estimated 2 x 10^20 gm uranium and 5 x 10^20 gm thorium in the lithosphere, helium should be generated radiogenically at a rate of about 3 x 10^9 gm/yr. Moreover the (secondary) cosmic-ray source of helium has been estimated to be of comparable magnitude. Apparently nearly all the helium from sedimentary rocks and, according to Keevil and Hurley, about 0.8 of the radiogenic helium from igneous rocks, has been released into the atmosphere during geological times (currently taken to be about 5 x 10^9 yr). Hence more than 10^20 gm of helium should have passed into the atmosphere since the 'beginning.' Because the atmosphere contains only 3.5 x 10^15 gm helium 4, the common assumption is therefore that about 10^20 gm of helium 4 must also have passed out through the exosphere, and that the present rate of loss through the atmosphere balances the rate of exudation from the lithosphere. '

Cook says that uniformitarian geologists have attempted to explain this discrepancy by assuming that the other 99.96 percent has escaped from the Earth's gravitational field into space -- but this process has not been observed.

G. Brent Dalrymple has rebutted Cook's claim by suggesting a mechanism that might account for the missing helium 4. In his 1984 Reply to 'Scientific Creationism,' Dalrymple says,

'Banks and Holzer (12) have shown that the polar wind can account for an escape of 2 to 4 x 10^6 ions/cm^2 .sec of helium 4, which is nearly identical to the estimated production flux of (2.5 ± 1.5) x 10^6 atoms/cm^2.sec.'

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:15:35 No.11772479 Report

Quoted By: >>11772483 >>11774564

>>11772474
There are two things that make Banks and Holzer's findings unsuitable for the purposes to which Dalrymple tries to fit them. The first is that the figure he cites for escape may be great enough to account for the production whose figures he gives, but that is only because he has selected a low estimate for production. In reality the escape rates he cites are not remotely great enough to account for the amount of helium 4 that must have been created and lostremember we are looking for more than 10^20 grams of missing helium. This means that if the Earth really is 4,500 million years old, then its atmosphere would have to lose helium at a rate somewhere around 10^16 atoms/cm2.sec., or some ten orders of magnitude faster than Dalrymple's figure, to account for the missing helium.

The second objection is that the figures he uses come from a time (nearly 30 years ago) when most space scientists assumed that the Earth was moving through the vacuum of space -- that the atmosphere was surrounded by nothing but empty space. At that time it was believed that light hydrogen and helium atoms would either escape or be dislodged into the void.

More recent studies have suggested that far from losing helium, the atmosphere may actually be gaining quantities of this gas. As it orbits the Sun, the Earth moves not through empty space but through a thin solar atmosphere, which consists principally of hydrogen and helium resulting from nuclear processes within the Sun. Measurements in the upper atmosphere have suggested that the Earth is gaining helium by this means.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:16:37 No.11772483 Report

Quoted By: >>11772490 >>11774564

>>11772479
In his 1987 book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, space scientist James Lovelock writes,

'The outermost layer of the air, so thin as to contain only a few hundred atoms per cubic centimeter, the exosphere, can be thought of as merging into the equally thin outer atmosphere of the sun. It used to be assumed that the escape of hydrogen atoms from the exosphere gave the Earth its oxygen atmosphere. Not only do we now doubt that this process is on a sufficient scale to account for oxygen, but we rather suspect that the loss of hydrogen atoms is offset or even counterbalanced by the flux of hydrogen from the sun'

Of course, Lovelock is writing about hydrogen not helium. However, helium is four times heavier than hydrogen and it is plentiful in the Sun's atmosphere since it is the principal product of the Sun's nuclear fusion process. If hydrogen is not lost but gained, then the same will be true for helium.

If we take the measured amount of helium 4 in the atmosphere and apply the radioactive dating technique to it, says Cook, we find that the calculation yields an age for the Earth of around 175,000 years. This procedure fails our criteria of reliability in that the possible acquisition of helium 4 from outside upsets the process.

The only conclusion that can be safely drawn from the discordance between the uranium-lead and uranium-helium dates is that this form of radioactive dating is unreliable.

What about the dating techniques based on other radioactive elements referred to earlier? The methods based on decay of potassium to argon and rubidium to strontium are also subject to some of the defects already described, as well as having specific problems of their own.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:17:57 No.11772490 Report

Quoted By: >>11772494 >>11774564

>>11772483
Potassium minerals are commonly found in many rocks. Potassium 40 decays by capturing an electron and turning into the gas argon 40, with a half-life of 1.3 billion years.

Advocates of the potassium-argon method claim that the argon gas that results from the decay of potassium 40 remains trapped in the crystal structures of the mineral in which it forms -- 'like a bird in a cage,' to use Brent Dalrymple's phrase -- and accumulates through the ages, thus acting as a clock when the stored daughter isotope is released and measured.

The potassium-argon method is suspect because the end product used for assay, argon 40, is a very common isotope in the atmosphere and the rocks of the Earth's crust. Indeed, argon is the twelfth most abundant chemical element on Earth and more than 99 percent of it is argon 40. There is no physical or chemical way to tell whether any given sample of argon 40 is the residue of radioactive decay or was present in the rocks when they formed. Moreover, as argon is an inert gas that will not react with any other element, its atoms will always be trapped in the crystal structures of minerals whether it is radiogenic in origin or not. Cook has calculated that even if the Earth were five billion years old, no more than 1 percent of the argon 40 currently present on Earth could be a radiogenic daughter product and it is thus highly probable that some of the argon 40 in all potassium minerals has been derived directly rather than as a result of decay.

So, if radiogenic argon 40 is like 'a bird in a cage,' then it is a cage that already contains birds of the same feather, from which it is indistinguishable.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:18:58 No.11772494 Report

Quoted By: >>11772500 >>11774564

>>11772490
The possibility of anomalous inclusion of argon is not merely conjecture but is borne out by numerous studies of volcanic rocks that have resulted in false dates. Even modern volcanic lava formed in recent historical times has been dated as up to 3 billion years old by the potassium-argon method.

According to Noble and Naughton of the Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics:

'The radiogenic argon and helium contents of three basalts erupted into the deep ocean from an active volcano (Kilauea) have been measured. Ages calculated from these measurements increase with sample depth up to 22 million years for lavas deduced to be recent. Caution is urged in applying dates from deep-ocean basalts in studies on ocean-floor spreading.'

A similar study of Hawaiian basaltic lava actually dating from an eruption in 1801, near Hualalei, came up with potassium-argon dates ranging from 160 million years to 3 billion years. In 1969, McDougall of the Australian National University measured the ages of lava in New Zealand and got an age of 465,000 years whereas the carbon dating of wood included in the lava showed it to be less than 1,000 years old. The suspected reason for the anomalous ages was the incorporation of environmental argon 40 at the time of the eruption, and the inheritance of argon 40 from the parent magma.

As well as the anomalous inclusion, or gain, of argon 40, it is also possible for mineral samples to become anomalously depleted of the gas if the rocks from which the sample comes have been heated after formation, for instance by further volcanic activity. Such disturbed samples will yield incorrect dates if a simple accumulation clock method is applied to them.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:19:59 No.11772500 Report

Quoted By: >>11772506 >>11774564

>>11772494
Dating advocates, such as Dalrymple, accept that potassium-argon methods can be flawed but claim that they know the occasions on which the results are correct and when they are incorrect: 'Like all radiometric methods, the potassium-argon method does not work on all rocks and minerals under all geologic conditions. By many experiments over the past three decades, geologists have learned which rocks and minerals act as closed systems and under what geologic conditions they do so.'

The problem with this widely held belief is that there is no truly independent means of verifying the age of any given sample (other than the very exceptional cases mentioned above). And the experiments to which Dalrymple refers have consisted solely of rejecting dates that seem wrong while accepting those that seem right, 'seem' in this context meaning in line with uniformitarian expectations, thus compiling a database of self-fulfilling predictions.

Radiogenic strontium -- strontium 87 -- occurs in rocks as a result of decay of radioactive rubidium. However, this technique is again complicated by the fact that strontium 87 also occurs both as a daughter product of radioactive decay and as a commonly occurring element in its own right. Typically, rocks contain ten times more common strontium 87 than radiogenic strontium 87. Rubidium-strontium is also suspect because it is subject to exactly the same neutron capture process as uranium-lead. This time it is strontium 86 that can be transformed to strontium 87.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:21:06 No.11772506 Report

Quoted By: >>11772511 >>11774564

>>11772500
Most disconcerting of all is the fact that these various methods of dating commonly produce discordant ages for the same rock deposit. Where this occurs, a 'harmonization' of discordant dates is carried out -- in other words, the figures are adjusted until they seem right. The chief tool employed to harmonize discordant dates is the simple device of labeling unexpected ages as anomalous and, in the future, discarding those rock samples that will lead to the 'anomalous' dates. This practice is the explanation of why many dating results seem to support each other -- because all samples that give ages other than expected values are rejected as being 'unsuitable' for dating.

If radioactive dating is seriously flawed as claimed here, why is it so enthusiastically embraced by dating scientists and so readily accepted by their academic colleagues?

On the face of it, radioactive dating is the most accurate source of chronometry available. Indeed, our most trustworthy timepieces are atomic clocks: clocks regulated by precisely the same processes used in dating techniques. And because radioactive decay is the most stable process known, then it appears that methods of geochronometry based on radioactive decay must themselves be the most accurate methods.

This widely held view fundamentally misrepresents the true nature of radioactive decay geochronometry. The accuracy of such techniques is not only critically dependent on the constancy of the rate of decay, but it is even more critically dependent on the accurate assay of the residue of the decay process -- how much argon 40 is left or how much strontium 87 is left -- and how that residue is distinguished from the nonradiogenic argon 40, or strontium 87, that occurs naturally in the same rocks.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:22:08 No.11772511 Report

Quoted By: >>11772515 >>11774564

>>11772506
This issue has nothing to do with how constant radioactive decay processes may be: it is purely a human problem in measurement. If the scientist conducting the experiment fails to measure the residue accurately, the age he gets will be distorted by an unknown number of years.

But how is it possible that dozens of scientists around the world involved in dating techniques could all be misled on such fundamental matters? How could so many scientists be wrong?

I believe there are at least four ways in which dating scientists could mislead themselves: ways that may be transparent to them, and which could lead them to obtain comparable results apparently independently.

First, there is the untestable error. When errors in radiometric dates are pointed out by critics, advocates of the method usually dismiss such criticism on the grounds that errors are very rare in comparison with the thousands of dates that are not found to be incorrect. This is a misleading argument because the overwhelming majority of dates could never be challenged or found to be flawed since there is no genuinely independent evidence that can contradict those dates. The reason why known anomalies are very rare is simply because independent evidence is very rare.

What is alarming is that in the very few cases of truly independent evidence we have -- such as Mrs. Ahrens's rock paintings, and the volcanic lavas in Hawaii and New Zealand -- the measured dates are spectacularly wrong. The response of radioactive dating advocates is to reject the few cases of independent verification as aberrations, and to prefer instead their theory purely because of its internal consistency, principally that it fits with a belief in an old Earth. In doing so, they are rejecting the only real independent check available.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:23:09 No.11772515 Report

Quoted By: >>11772519 >>11774564

>>11772511
Second, there is the phenomenon of 'ballpark' thinking. This is exemplified by the error that was made in the curvature of the mirror for the Hubble space telescope. The error was not discovered by normal inspection processes, even in one of the world's best-equipped laboratories, because it was so big -- more than a centimeter out -- that it was outside the range that anyone was mentally prepared to check on. Had it been a millionth of a meter out, it would have been spotted at once.

Ever since Charles Lyell estimated that the end of the Cretaceous was 80 million years ago, the accepted value has been in this ballpark. Any dating scientist who suggested looking outside the ballpark, at 20 million years or 10 million or 5 million, would be looked on as a crackpot by his colleagues. More significantly, perhaps, he would not be able to get any funding for his research.

A third potential source of error is the phenomenon of'intellectual phase-locking.' It is not widely realized that the published value of physical constants often varies. Before it was settled internationally by definition, the measured value for the velocity of light varied considerably, as did the gravitational constant and Planck's constant. One reason for such variation is that all scientists make experimental errors that they have to correct. They naturally prefer to correct them in the direction of the currently accepted value thus giving an unconscious trend to measured values. This group thinking has even been given a name: 'intellectual phase-locking.'

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:24:10 No.11772519 Report

Quoted By: >>11772522

>>11772515
Fourth, there are powerful professional pressures on scientists to conform to a consensus. Dating geologists are offended by the suggestion that their beliefs can or would influence the dates obtained. Yet nothing could be easier or more natural. Take for example a rock sample from the late Cretaceous, a period which is universally believed to date from some 65 million years ago. Any dating scientist who obtained a date from the sample of, say, 10 million years or 150 million years, would not publish such a result because he or she will, quite sincerely, assume it was in error. On the other hand, any dating scientist who did obtain a date of 65 million years would hasten to publish it as widely as possible. Thus the published dating figures always conform to preconceived dates and never contradict those dates. If all the rejected dates were retrieved from the waste basket and added to the published dates, the combined results would show that the dates produced are the scatter that one would expect by chance alone.

Dating scientists have looked for a technique that would enable them to eliminate the problems of the simple accumulation clock method caused by inclusion or depletion of daughter isotopes. They believe that they have found such a technique in the idea first proposed by L.O. Nicolaysen of Witwatersrand University in 1961 and which is usually called the Isochron technique.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:25:11 No.11772522 Report

Quoted By: >>11772525 >>11774564

>>11772519
Geologists said to themselves, if we can find a way of using not just a single isotope, but of linking together several isotopes, and if we get a concordance of ages when we measure the linked group, then we can have a high level of confidence that the age we obtain is real and not a disturbed date. The main reason for believing this is that both of the two disturbing phenomena -- inclusion or depletion of daughter isotope -- will affect the different isotopes in a rock sample differentially, so they can no longer be made to lie on the same straight line when their ages are plotted on an Isochron graph.

On the face of it, the Isochron technique solves the basic problem of the simple accumulation clock method. In reality, it solves it only in a single limiting case -- the case where all daughter isotopes are measured with perfect accuracy. If there is any systematic reason why the assay of the daughter isotopes is flawed, then the Isochron method is worse than useless -- it is actively misleading, because it will cause geologists to place a high level of confidence in results that are actually false.

But, of course, the whole problem with radiometric methods is the difficulty of making accurate assays of the daughter isotopes coupled with the fact that there are a number of pressures compelling geologists to arrive at certain acceptable target dates and reject unacceptable dates in their published results.

In reality the apparent concordance of some of the dates derived by Isochron radiometric techniques is an artifact of two influences: the selection of 'suitable' rock samples for assay and the rejection of 'unsuitable' samples; and the selection of only some dates for publication and the nonpublication of others as being erroneous.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:26:18 No.11772525 Report

Quoted By: >>11772528 >>11774564

>>11772522
That the Isochron technique does not, in practice, provide the high level of confidence that some geologists attribute to it can be seen in the case history examined later.

In evaluating the strength of the evidence and arguments against radiometric dating, the sticking point for many reasonable people is that a great age for the Earth -- in the region of 4,500 million years -- seems securely arrived at, whatever lesser problems may remain to be ironed out in radiometric dating techniques. Yet, as Melvin Cook has pointed out, the Earth may be made of materials that are 4,500 million years old and yet still have been formed relatively recently. Even if dates for meteorites and other celestial bodies such as the Moon and Mars could reliably tell us the age of the materials comprising the solar system, they still cannot tell us when the Earth itself was formed.

Nothing of what I have presented in this text has attracted such heated and vigorous rebuttal as this section on the flawed nature of radiometric dating. Advocates of radiometric dating have said that it is wrong of me to charge that discordant dates can be derived for the same deposit by different radiometric methods, wrong to say that such discordant dates are harmonized in the laboratory and wrong to say that dating scientists would be confused by the anomalous presence, or absence of, for example, nonradiogenic argon 40. One critic wrote to say that it is 'dishonest' of me to include examples such as the modern Hawaiian lavas. 'This is the sort of thing that is allowed for in radiometric dating,' he told me indignantly. Another critic wrote and told me that the use of 'Isochron' techniques for radiometric dating ensures that spurious dates would be eliminated and lead to a high level of confidence in radiometric dates.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:27:22 No.11772528 Report

Quoted By: >>11772533 >>11774564

>>11772525
These beliefs are no doubt sincerely held, but to show just how misguided they are, let me give a brief summary of one episode -- involving some of the world's most distinguished isotope-dating laboratories -- that embraced all the dating errors referred to above, despite every precautionary measure and attention to detail.

Paleontologists have made many important discoveries of human bones and tools at Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolph) in Kenya. Among the deposits in which important finds have been made are those marked by a layer of volcanic ash or tuff identified by Kay Behrensmeyer of Harvard and which has become known as the KBS (Kay Behrensmeyer Site) Tuff.

From as long ago as 1967, when Richard Leakey began making finds there, it became important to try to date the KBS Tuff. Although it is volcanic and hence promising for the potassium-argon method, the deposit is not 'juvenile' or original but has been transported by water and laid down as a sedimentary rock. It thus contains some foreign material including much older particles that could give an anomalous date -- a fact which geologists who have dated it have recognized and which they have dealt with by selecting suitable juvenile particles to date.

In 1969, F. J. Fitch of Cambridge and J. A. Miller of Birkbeck College, London, dated the KBS Tuff as 'very close to 2.6 million years old.' This had important implications later because when Richard Leakey found a very rare human skull below the KBS Tuff, he was able to say that it was found below rock that was 'securely dated' at 2.6 million years ago.

!!y9Ak+jN9iwo

!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:28:38 No.11772533 Report

Quoted By: >>11772537 >>11774564

>>11772528
In 1976 Nature carried a second article by Fitch, Miller, and Hooker. They had refined their 1969 date using a more accurate constant of decay and found an age of 2.42 million years ago. In the same paper, the authors referred to 'a small programme of conventional total fusion potassium-argon age determinations on East Rudolf pumice samples undertaken at Berkeley.'

The experiments they referred to were conducted by G. H. Curtis and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley who, using potassium-argon dating, came up with dates of 1.6 and 1.82 million years for the KBS Tuff -- a discrepancy with Fitch's results ranging from half a million years to close to a million years.

Commenting on the discordant dating, Fitch said, 'Potassiumargon apparent ages in the range 1.6 - 1.8 million years obtained from the KBS Tuff by other workers are regarded as discrepant, and may have been obtained from samples affected by argon loss.'

What is especially interesting about these results is that both teams used Isochron methods -- the methods that are claimed to ensure mistakes cannot be made simply because of anomalous loss or gain of argon, as in the Hawaiian lavas. Thus Fitch was alleging that the Berkeley team had got their sums wrong precisely because they failed to allow for argon loss -- the very fault that my critic assured me was 'the sort of thing that is allowed for in radiometric dating.'

Perhaps because the issue of discordance had become public, Fitch went even further in his Nature paper and disclosed that the Berkeley group reported 'scatter' in their dates ranging from 1.5 to 6.9 million years, a range large enough to cast some doubts on the accuracy of their work. By comparison, in their own experiments, Fitch and his colleagues claimed much lower 'scatter' in apparent ages ranging from 0.5 to 2.4 million years implying that their measurements were more accurate.

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:29:53 No.11772537 Report

Quoted By: >>11772542 >>11774564

>>11772533
The controversy was brought to a close in 1981 by an argon-40-to-argon-39 study by Ian McDougall of the Australian National University, giving a date of 1.88 million years. As this was halfway between the two previous discordant studies, the combatants decided to call it a day -- even though it meant they were both wrong by a large margin.

In his paper McDougall frankly confessed that 'conventional potassium-argon, argon-argon and fission track dating of pumice clasts within this tuff have yielded a distressingly large range of ages.'

Indeed, McDougall went even further than this rare emotive statement, because he revealed that the 'scatter' referred to by Fitch was in reality even greater than that of Curtis. Fitch and Miller actually reported results of ages ranging from 0.52 to 2.64 million years for one set of samples and ages from 8.43 to 17.5 million years on another sample before eventually settling on their 2.6-million-year date.

McDougall concluded, 'On the basis of the large scatter in the ages and the small proportion of argon-40 in the gas extracted from the anorthoclase concentrates, I suggest that the results are analytically less precise than given by these authors.'

In the restrained diplomatic language of science, this is the equivalent of one scientist whacking another over the head with the sort of club that Lake Turkana Man was probably using on his enemies anywhere between 0.5 and 17.5 million years ago.

One aspect of this affair that deserves special attention is that all the scientists dating the formation started by selecting rocks they thought were the right age and discarding samples which seemed wrong. No one doubts that this is done honestly and intelligently. But the question must be asked: How do dating scientists know in advance which are the right rocks and which the wrong rocks? What scientifically led them to reject dates of 0.5 million years or 17.5 million years in favor of 2.6 million?

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!!y9Ak+jN9iwo Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:30:54 No.11772542 Report

Quoted By: >>11774564 >>11783955

>>11772537
The answer that dating adherents give is that any scientist would exclude the few extreme measurements and settle for the majority of figures that are clustered together in a straight line or 'plateau' when the results are plotted graphically. But, of course, had they measured the salinity of the oceans as a means of geochronometry (a method which as we saw earlier is known to be flawed) they would have found the same kind of 'plateau' grouping for most results, regardless of where they took their seawater samples, because the method itself is systematically flawed. The majority of their dates would have been in the range of 100 million years because that is what the current salt content and annual erosion figures indicate. Constancy of results is not an indicator of correctness when the method itself is defective.

The truth is that, to those who dated the KBS Tuff, the chosen date of 2.6 million years seemed to be more 'reasonable' than 0.5 million or 17.5 million. And the word reasonable in this context can be interpreted only as meaning consistent with uniformitarian and Darwinist beliefs on dating. The objection to this viewpoint is that 'being reasonable' is not an acceptable substitute for scientific measurement and proof.

The fact is that presently it is impossible to say with any confidence how old the Earth is, beyond the obvious fact that it predates the calendar of human history.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 00:32:56 No.11772549 Report

Quoted By:

>>11768268
Really activates the almonds.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 01:45:14 No.11772726 Report

Quoted By:

>>11768268
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12378934
here's how trees could survive 3-4 months of darkness:
>>. Although they used up food stores in the winter, they more than made up for this by their ability to photosynthesise 24 hours per day in the summer. In fact the main problem seems to have been that trees did not know when to stop. "We found that trees made so much food during the summers… that this eventually caused photosynthesis to slow down," Professor Beerling explained. "As a result they couldn't fully take advantage of the long hot summers for photosynthesis".

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 03:57:15 No.11773038 Report

Quoted By:

>something may be amiss with the view of uniformitarian geology
Very true. About that, see: https://files.catbox.moe/6vxlly.webm

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 03:58:16 No.11773041 Report

Quoted By:

>>11772407
>something may be amiss with the view of uniformitarian geology
Very true. About that, see: https://files.catbox.moe/6vxlly.webm

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 09:04:17 No.11773605 Report

Quoted By:

>>11771457
that's fucking awesome though. Let's move to antarctic.

How fast did this change of carbon in the atmosphere occur?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 12:03:42 No.11773898 Report

Quoted By:

>>11768893
>The problem that has been facing paleobotanists is how such forests could have thrived in a latitude which at present would have forced them to 'sleep' through the long polar night.
You obviously haven't thought about it very much. Deciduous trees.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 13:15:19 No.11774077 Report

Quoted By: >>11774106

schizo take meds

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 13:28:50 No.11774106 Report

Quoted By:

>>11774077
are you referring to anon talking about carbon dating?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 15:48:17 No.11774421 Report

Quoted By: >>11776986

>>11772281
Where can I read more about this?

Anonymous

View Same Google iqdb SauceNAO 0a1.jpg, 80KiB, 643x820

Anonymous Mon 08 Jun 2020 16:39:00 No.11774564 Report

Quoted By: >>11776248 >>11776934

>>11772542
>>11772542
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>>11772350

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 09 Jun 2020 01:22:52 No.11776248 Report

Quoted By:

>>11774564
Yes.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 09 Jun 2020 01:35:06 No.11776293 Report

Quoted By: >>11782538 >>11784588

>>11768281
Right wing lie.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 09 Jun 2020 04:55:31 No.11776934 Report

Quoted By:

>>11774564
I did; it's great.

Anonymous

View Same Google iqdb SauceNAO 1582433889677.jpg, 107KiB, 640x889

Anonymous Tue 09 Jun 2020 05:16:35 No.11776986 Report

Quoted By:

>>11774421
If you want to read, then the books by Dwardu Cardona, Primordial Star, Metamorphic Star, Newborn Star, Flare Star and God Star, and David Talbott's book The Saturn Myth.

For videos, see: https://www.youtube.com/user/ThunderboltsProject/videos

Recommend you start with:

> Remembering the End of the World (Full Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oophJNlP-fk

> Symbols of an Alien Sky (Full Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EAlTcZFwY

> Discourses on An Alien Sky playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwOAYhBuU3UeFB-ygaH63Seg6r6C_dtqB

> The Lightning Scarred Planet Mars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRV1e5_tB6Y

> The Electric Comet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34wtt2EUToo

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 09 Jun 2020 20:06:28 No.11779259 Report

Quoted By: >>11780885

>>11768900
>[48]
A 32 year old source. Is it still valid? No continental drift sounds very strange. The argument makes little sense.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 09 Jun 2020 23:08:52 No.11779858 Report

Quoted By:

>this fucking nigger has half of all the posts ITT

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 10 Jun 2020 04:33:32 No.11780885 Report

Quoted By:

>>11779259
learn to read

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 10 Jun 2020 16:30:18 No.11782538 Report

Quoted By:

>>11776293
what is?

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 10 Jun 2020 22:33:23 No.11783955 Report

Quoted By:

>>11772542
I read the whole thing. I've always had my doubts about carbon dating. This confirmed all my suspicions.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 10 Jun 2020 22:37:54 No.11783971 Report

Quoted By: >>11784275 >>11784435

>>11768268
continental drift and climate was warmer back in the day. any other solution is schizo non sense. ie !!y9Ak+jN9iwo whatever this person says. also i dont believe whatever this image says because its probably false and created by !!y9Ak+jN9iwo so he can paste his schizo essay.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 11 Jun 2020 00:26:10 No.11784275 Report

Quoted By:

>>11783971
>continental drift

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 11 Jun 2020 01:27:42 No.11784432 Report

Quoted By: >>11784584

>>11768268
"/" are not "."
Is this tranny culture run amuck?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 11 Jun 2020 01:28:52 No.11784435 Report

Quoted By:

>>11783971
lurk moar

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 11 Jun 2020 02:23:15 No.11784584 Report

Quoted By:

>>11784432
In the context, / is entirely appropriate while . wouldn't be. Neither would ; or :

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 11 Jun 2020 02:24:52 No.11784588 Report

Quoted By:

>>11776293
>everything which hurts my worldview is a an evil rightwing nazi /pol/ lie

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