afdave
Posts: 1621
Joined: April 2006
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AS EXPECTED, THE MORE I STUDY RADIOMETRIC "DATING", THE MORE I FIND THAT MOST OF THE "DATES" ARE MEANINGLESS
(I'm sorry for you if you don't come to the same conclusions ... I'm doing my best to help you come out from the fog of Darwinism and Deep Time, but I can only do so much. While I hope that I can convince ATBCers of the truth, I am realisitic enough to know that I probably will not. So my goal has to be to educate myself, then help in the larger effort of educating the public, so that pressure will be applied from below on our educational systems.)
On Sep 4, I started a new topic ... a study of Snelling's 2003 paper on "THE RELEVANCE OF Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd AND Pb-Pb ISOTOPE SYSTEMATICS TO ELUCIDATION OF THE GENESIS AND HISTORY OF RECENT ANDESITE FLOWS AT MT NGAURUHOE, NEW ZEALAND, AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR RADIOISOTOPIC DATING."
BACKGROUND TO THE PAPER
As soon as I posted the abstract and conclusions of this paper, JonF began yelling "Fraud, fraud" because Snelling did a whole rock analysis and did not separate the minerals for analysis. Faid brought up an older (1998) paper of Snelling's that was essentially a confirmation of the fact that the whole system of Argon dating (K-Ar and Ar-Ar) is flawed because of excess Argon, Argon loss, mixing, inheritance, etc., etc.
So let's deal with these questions, then return to the Conclusions of Snelling's 2003 paper which have huge implications for attempted radiometric "dating" of lava flows and ash beds in the Grand Staircase and elsewhere.
SNELLING'S 1998 PAPER -- ARGON "DATING" IS MEANINGLESS
Unless otherwise noted, all footnotes refer to Snellings 1998 paper found here
http://www.icr.org/research/index/researchp_as_r01/
K-Ar "dating" of rocks used to be quite common because it is cheap and simple -- about US$350 for a test using the "model age" method. K-Ar model ages are the most abundant dates published, but also are the most frequently questioned and discarded. Dalrymple and Lanphere helped popularize this method in 1969. They said in that year ... | Quote | | a silicate melt will not usually retain the 40Ar that is produced, and thus the potassium-argon clock is not "set" until the mineral solidifies and cools sufficiently to allow the 40Ar to accumulate in the mineral lattice. [18, p. 46] |
Yet in their study of 26 historic lava flows that same year, 5 of them contained "excess" Argon. [18] Many other whole rock K-Ar "age" studies have also found "excess Argon" including Krummenacher (1970) who reported 5 such instances, McDougall (1969), Fisher (1971), Armstrong (1978) and Esser et al (1997) just to name a few. There are many more. In spite of all this, Dalrymple as late as 1991 was still touting the K-Ar method ... | Quote | | The K-Ar method is the only decay scheme that can be used with little or no concern for the initial presence of the daughter isotope. This is because 40Ar is an inert gas that does not combine chemically with any other element and so escapes easily from rocks when they are heated. Thus, while a rock is molten the 40Ar formed by decay of 40K escapes from the liquid. [17, p.91] |
And the problem of "excess" Argon extends to the 40Ar-39Ar method as well ... | Quote | In a detailed 40Ar/39Ar dating study of high-grade metamorphic rocks in the Broken Hill region of New South Wales (Australia), Harrison and McDougall [48] found evidence of widely distributed excess 40Ar*. The minerals most affected were plagioclase and hornblende, with step heating 40Ar/39Ar "age" spectra yielding results of up to 9.588 Ga. Such unacceptable "ages" were produced by excess40Ar* release, usually at temperatures of 350-650C and/or 930-1380C, suggesting the excess 40Ar* is held in sites within the respective mineral lattices with different heating requirements for its release.
http://www.icr.org/research/index/researchp_as_r01/ |
Snelling concludes in this paper as follows ... | Quote | The fact that there is even some excess 40Ar* in these recent andesite flows, and that it appears to have ultimately come from the upper mantle geochemical reservoir, where it is regarded as leftover primordial argon not yet fully expelled by the process of outgassing that is supposed to have occurred since the initial formation of the Earth, has very significant implications.
First, this is clearly consistent with a young Earth, where the very short time-scale since the creation of the Earth has been insufficient for all the primordial argon to be released yet from the Earth?s deep interior. Furthermore, it would also seem that even the year-long global catastrophic Flood, when large-scale convection and turdecer occurred in the mantle [4], was insufficient to expel all the deep Earth?s primordial argon.
Second, this primordial argon is, in part, "excess" 40Ar not generated by radioactive decay of 40K, which has then been circulated up into crustal rocks where it may continue migrating and building up to partial pressure status regionally. Because the evidence clearly points to this being the case, then when samples of crustal rocks are analysed for K-Ar "dating" the investigators can never really be sure that whatever 40Ar* is in the samples is from in situ radioactive decay of 40K since the formation of the rocks, or whether some or all of it is from the "excess 40Ar*" geochemical reservoirs in the lower and upper mantles. This could even be the case when the K-Ar analyses yield "dates" compatible with other radioisotopic "dating" systems and/or with fossil "dating" based on evolutionary assumptions. And there would be no way of knowing because the 40Ar* from radioactive decay of 40K cannot be distinguished analytically from primordial 40Ar not from radioactive decay, except of course by external assumptions about the ages of the samples.
Therefore, these considerations call into question all K-Ar "dating", whether "model ages" or "isochron ages", and all 40Ar/39Ar "dating", as well as "fossil dating" that has been calibrated against K-Ar "dates". Although seemingly insignificant in themselves, the anomalous K-Ar "model ages" for these recent andesite flows at Mt Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, lead to deeper questions. Why is there excess40Ar* in these rocks? From where did it come? Answers to these questions in turn point to significant implications that totally undermine such radioactive "dating" and that are instead compatible with a young Earth. |
PLENTY OF ARGON TO MEASURE, FAID
Now Faid claims that Snelling is a fraudster because Snelling knew that Geochron labs cannot date young samples because there is not enough daughter products to detect (the instruments are sensitive, but not THAT sensitive). Sorry, mister, that argument doesn't fly simply because there just "happened" to be plenty of daughter product to measure ... sorry to disappoint you ... Geochron labs had no problem at all detecting the daughter products because there was plenty there. Remember, if the Argon dating system is sound, then young (historic) lava flows should not have any detectable levels of daughter. Snelling did nothing different than all the other studies on historic flows cited which found excess Argon. No fraud. No foul. Just a big, giant spotlight on the complete failure of the Argon methods of "dating" rocks.
JonF, TED KOPPEL, NEW ORLEANS AND HURRICANE KATRINA
Next we have JonF yelling "Fraud, fraud" about Snelling's next paper, the 2003 one which used the same samples as the 1998 paper, but focused, not on Argon "dating," but on the fact that the Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd and Pb-Pb signatures of these same lava flows have nothing to do with the dates of creation of the lava, but rather indicate their origin in the mantle. JonF claims Snelling is a fraud in this case because he includes xenoliths. But this is a little bit like saying that Ted Koppel was a fraud in reporting that "A million residents of New Orleans lost their homes today because of Hurricane Katrina." I get this funny picture in my mind of JonF yelling, "Wait a minute, Mr. Koppel! You're a fraud ... those aren't all residents of New Orleans! Some of them are foreigners! There's residents of Baton Rouge and Alexandria and Ruston and even residents from other states there in New Orleans! How dare you say that a million residents of New Orleans lost their homes! You're a fraud!" JonF is technically correct ... there are many non-residents included in Koppel's statement ... but the point is ... "Who cares?" To point this out misses the point entirely of Mr. Koppel's report which is to point out that a whole bunch of people lost their homes. In the same way, it is ludicrous to complain about Snelling not separating out xenoliths and analyzing them separately simply because that would make very little difference in the actual numbers and would have exactly ZERO effect on the conclusion of the study. Xenoliths only accounted for 2.6 and 4.5% respectively of the following flows: 1. Ngauruhoe VU 29250 [15], a 1954 flow. 2. Olivine-bearing low-Si andesite, June 30, 1954 Ngauruhoe flow [12].
So Jon, yell all you want to about Snelling's "fraud" and while you are at it, why don't you mount a campaign to expose Mr. Koppel as well.
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Now that we have silenced JonF and Faid (well, I am sure they won't stay silent, so a better term would be "refuted" or "exposed"), we return to the main points of our present study ...
1) Argon dating on recent (historic) lava flows is bogus because there is often lots of easily measureable "excess" Argon.
2) All Argon dating of ancient flows is bogus for the same reason. Yes, I know it's sad that all those geologists were suckers for all those years, but then, so were the geocentrists and phlogiston people for many years, too.
3) Most of the "dates" for layers of the grand Staircase given by Deadman have been Argon dating and are thus irrelevant. So Deadman has claimed that he gave me over 80 RM "dates" for the Grand Staircase, but the fact is that these 80 "dates" apply to around 4 layers of the Grand Staircase and most of them are Argon dates.
So what I am telling you, once again, is that ...
The layers of the Grand Staircase cannot be dated radiometrically. Of the 4 or so layers that RM dates have been attempted, most of them have been shown to be bogus and we have not even begun looking at the other dating methods. Will we find that they are bogus too?
So the layers cannot be dated radiometrically and the only basis for saying they are as old as they are is, as I said in the beginning, because of the fossils they contain. And of course, assuming a layer is old because of the fossils it contains is just circular reasoning.
A much better explanation for the layers of the Grand Staircase which consists primarily of water-laid sediment is ...
THE GREAT FLOOD OF NOAH.
Have a nice day!
(JonF ... I will also deal with your claim that zircons falsify Snellings conclusions in his 2003 paper. But not today. I'm going to lunch!
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A DILEMMA FOR THE COMMITTED NATURALIST
A Hi-tech alien spaceship lands on earth ... DESIGNED.
A Hi-tech alien rotary motor found in a cell ... NOT DESIGNED.
http://afdave.wordpress.com/....ess.com
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