How Radiometric Dating Works: Relative not Absolute Ages - Dr. Andrew Snelling (Conf Lecture)

well good morning this is gonna be a all morning session and there'll be two two segments to it the first will be radiometric dating relative not absolute ages it'll be the longer of the two presentations because there's more to talk about and explained then we'll have a short break and then we'll go on to talk about radiocarbon dating in need of need of recalibration and I think you'll find that interesting but we've got the time to to look at this topic you know in a slower pace and trying to explain as much as possible to you and I hope that you will learn you'll be able to follow through if you have any questions then certainly fire them at me but when it comes to this question of radiometric dating you know a lot of people their eyes glaze over but it's really not that difficult once you understand the basic technicalities involved so the first question is how are the ages of Roth's determined you know by color or appearance a the rocks come already label you know hi I'm millions of years old see by observing rocks form d by the minerals in the rocks B by the fossils in the rocks or by the Kemp F by the chemistry of the rocks and we're talking about measuring the ages okay and the answer should be obvious shouldn't be by the chemistry of the rocks which is our subject this morning and it's by assuming and utilizing radio the radioactive decay processes so each element of the atoms is made up of atoms with the same unique number of electrons and protons the number of protons gives the element its chemical name so for example element six is is carbon and it has six protons in the nucleus and by two balance of course it has six electrons orbiting in its shells now normally it would have the same number of neutrons in the nucleus so a regular carbon atom is called carbon-12 because it has the six neutrons and six protons in its nucleus now this is should all be revision for you but it doesn't hurt to go over it so that you understand this the symbols that are used in their designation and as I said it also has six electrons to balance its charge now the number of neutrons can vary and so you have carbon-12 which is regular carbon which is six neutrons in the nutrient you have carbon 13 with seven neutrons in the nucleus and you can have carbon 14 it has six protons and six neutrons to make up its nucleus but the problem is carbon carbon-14 is unstable you recognize that radiocarbon is carbon-14 carbon-14 dating radiocarbon what at the case and the the issue is that because of having eight neutrons in the nucleus with six protons it's getting a little bit crowded and it's a little bit unstable holding all those particles together in the in the nucleus of the carbon atom and so what happens is one of the neutral one of the neutrons in the nucleus decides to split and it ejects an electron and so it ends up now with seven protons in the nucleus and seven neutrons so and it is ejected electron so what does it become it becomes nitrogen 14 because it's now got 7 protons that's it's changed to a different element and so that's the basis of radiocarbon dating which we'll come to later in the morning so we we we talk about the different atoms with different Neutron numbers we call them isotopes and so we've got isotope 12 carbon 12 is the regular stable isotope of carbon we've got carbon 13 which is also stable and we've got radiocarbon or car 14 the 14 recurs refers to the atomic weight as we said before which is the neutrons plus protons and we call these isotopes of carbon and so sometimes you'll hear people refer to it as radioisotope dating which of course is short for radioactive isotopes isotopes that are and radiocarbon is an example where the the nuke the the radiocarbon is unstable because of the holding everything together in the nucleus and so the case to nitrogen 14 so some of these atoms are unstable as I've talked about carbon 14 but one of the one of the main ones is uranium 238 or and you can see the chemical symbol there you for uranium of course in two three eight it's the radioactive isotope of uranium and the the you get the isotopes is unstable atoms decay by ejecting these subatomic particles and they decay in two different ways there's beta decay which I already described to you I have to of course always remind myself to say it's beta decay not betta decay because otherwise you might not understand you know the southern southern pronunciation you know it you've got to remember that was the Americans that revolted the rest of us state was loyal to the to the Queen and so we speak the Queen's English anyhow jokes aside there's beta decay and there's alpha decay and beta decays where a nucleus a neutron splits into electron and proton essentially and alpha decay is where the atom spits out two neutrons and two protons and so that happens with uranium and so there's there's bigger jumps in in the changes and bigger particles that are emitted but we'll come back to that again in a moment in time so this process of change like that and this is an important thing because you know during the rape we're talking about the possibility of accelerated nuclear decay during a creation week and when people hear the word decay they they sort of you know but is it is it really a decay process the quality of the daughter atom is no less good than the quality of the parent atom and so it's really a process of nuclear transformation or nuclear change rather than decay but it's being known as decay and the problem of course is that part is okay it's the radiation that comes off because you get residual energy that's spit a spat out as gamma rays and that's quite nasty and so that's why people balk at this whole question of radioactive decay during the creation week but that's a different story so so we have the radioactive atoms or Radio isotopes result in stable atoms or isotopes of different elements because the transformation changes the number of protons in the nucleus so one element transforms into a different element and so we can talk about parent atoms and daughter atoms that are stable and minerals rocks and even fossils contain some of these radioactive parent atoms and the Decatur daughter atoms and I had fossils there too because it is possible it is possible to date some fossils and it's being done now using using Radio isotopes because if you've got the equipment to detect the trace amounts of these parent atoms and daughter atoms then it is possible to directly determine a radioactive age for a fossil but then there's all sorts of other assumptions that come into that that we don't have time to look at but here are the different methods that are available to use and you're familiar with carbon-14 or radio carbon decays to nitrogen 14 and we'll come back to that as a separate topic in the next session but there's there's two isotopes of uranium that are radioactive 238 and 235 the daaamn one is uranium-238 at the case to lead 206 eventually through a chain reaction as you as many of you aware and there's a series of steps involved eight steps uranium-235 of course is the minor isotope but it's the one that that that everyone wants to produce a nuclear bomb and that's that's another story as well there's potassium are a forty decays to argon-40 notice that you can tell the beta decays the the beta decay is in change the element but they don't change the atomic weight of the daughter whereas the alpha decays significantly change the atomic weight in the process the atomic weight of the parent other daughter is is different it's significantly different so potassium decays to argon which is a beta decay process and rubidium 87 to strontium 87 a beta decay process samarium changes to medium it's an alpha decay process many of you may not have heard of the elements samarium neodymium they are rare one of the rare earth elements and neodymium particularly is is significant most of you are familiar with those wind farms what you don't realize is that one of the elements that is important for those wind farms is the element neodymium why because neodymium combined with a regular magnet produces a super magnet and you need to have a super magnet to to get some traction to in a wind farm situation to get the electricity out of the you get a better begin a production of electricity with a better magnet and so that's why this element these rare earth elements night like near did he must sought-after at the moment and they usually find it in special situations in all deposits that are unique it's often often within uranium posits but the biggest producer of rare earth metals at the moment is China they have over 90% of the market which is a problem and the US government of courses it is is interested in companies exploring for it there is a mine that went out of production in California that's come back in to production because of the the prices of skyrocketed and that's in Mountain Pass and it's it's usually in very unique situations and that's a whole different realm in talking about where all deposits occur occur and why but we'll touch on that a little bit when I talk about radio halos actually on Wednesday tomorrow so how do we go about the process and this is fleshing out a little bit more of what I just dealt with very briefly yesterday a rock is chemically tested for the parent and daughter atoms if the rate of Radek that decay has remained constant and today's measured rate then we can calculate how long it has taken for the imagine out of daughter atoms to be derived from parent atoms and that time is regardless the rocks age and that in what course involves assumptions and let's let's step through this again a little bit more slowly but it's it's Creole II that simple as this it's a very good analogy the red atoms or red sand grains in the top bowl of the glass our glass is analogous the red sand a grains or an agonist to the pair atoms the radioactive decay the falling is analogous to it and then you get the green sand grains at the bottom in the bottom glass bowl and we know that if we start with no green sand grains down the bottom but all the red sand grains up here then it's an hourglass it can it takes an hour for the red atoms to fall and become green sand grains and so this is the analogous process now you immediately recognize that this has already been calibrated you buy it as our glasses it's already being tested by an external objective way of checking this clock but of course what external standard or objective way do we have of us accessing these radioactive clocks in the rocks we don't and so that means the assumptions are very very much an issue so we start with the sand grains at the top bowl it takes 1 hour for the red sand grains to fall the bottom to become green so we can actually chemically test in other words we do an eye balling of the the situation we can look at how many red sand grains are at the top but more importantly how many are green and down the bottom and so you know that if if a quarter of the of the sand grains are down the bottom it's been 15 minutes that your clock has been ticking it's that simple in other words you can back calculate how long ago the clock started and so it's the same with the rocks you measure the amount of daughter atoms and then you can back calculate well okay if there are no daughter atoms to begin with in the rock then we know the rate of decay it's taken it's taken X years to produce Y number of daughter atoms therefore that's when the rocks was formed and that's the age of the rock it's not that mysterious at all so as again it doesn't hurt to ya keep revising this is the rate of radioactive decay that is the falling has a remain constant then it can be calculated how long ago how long it took for the measured amount of green atoms the parent of the daughter atoms to accumulate from the red atoms the red sand grains at the top that's how long the hourglass has been operating but when we use that hourglass clock we have three crucial assumptions and as I said before you know we have an objective we've had the clock has been the hourglass clock has been objectively tested and checked and so those assumptions are not are so critical but they are when we're looking at the rocks with these radioactive dating methods when there's been no objective external standard then these assumptions become very crucial and there are three crucial assumption that are always involved with this system and let's go over them assumption number one the amount of parent and daughter atoms at the beginning when the rock form that is the initial conditions must be known you must know the initial conditions or you have to assume them and so for example it is assumed that when a volcanic rock forms such as a basalt then it will have no argon atoms in it and that the argon atoms that we measured in in today have all been derived from radioactive decay of potassium in the rock since the rock form and so we have to assume that there were no green atoms in the bottom of the glass coal all at the beginning or there was a known amount and that is that there was no inheritance in other words the rock didn't already form with inherited green atoms or daughter atoms in it and of course that requires observer weather observers there when the rock formed well usually no but it an example I'm going to give you yes there were and we find that the method doesn't work when there is an observer so if if when the method doesn't work when there is an observer doesn't it beg the question is well when when there is no observer can we be certain that the method also works there as well we'll come to that momentarily assumption number two all the daughter atoms measured the day must have only been derived by in situ radioactive decay of the parent atoms you know what the word in situ means in place and you have to therefore have a closed system it's like I say to people you know while you were you start your hourglass clock in the kitchen and while you're out of the room you missed your first ten-year-old comes up and lifts up the lids and puts more red out red and grains in and you come back and do an estimation well you get your clocks gonna file isn't it because it's been contaminated it's been interfered with and so the geologist has to assume that his rocks been sitting out there for millions of years and it hasn't been contaminated which is absurd the reason why it's absurd and here's that here's the summary first of all it requires an observer to through all those millions of years to to make sure that there's been no contamination but most people don't realize it's only when you when you get involved in in geological exploration with mining companies and you deal it do a drill hole you start drilling down through the rocks from the surface and then you dig down in a mine you know put a shaft down most people think that rocks that the surface look pretty fresh you're going to tell her you can tell a weathered rock from a fresh rock well it might surprise you that even the so-called fresh looking rocks and outcrops are already affected by weathering and the weathering effects can go down as deep as 500 feet so that means that the samples you collect at the surface which is primarily what is done for radioactive dating of rocks I already have the effects of weathering involved in them so they've already potentially been contaminated because ground waters you know bring in sulfur from the air mixed with water sulfuric acid acid rain you're going to affect the minerals in the rocks and any geologist who looks at a rock sample under a microscope at the microscopic scale you can start to see those effects so that's a problem an assumption number three the radioactive decay Russ rate must have been constant at today's measured rate that's an obvious obvious thing what happens of course if you're Mitch mischiefus ten-year-old puts a few drops of water in top and inside the glass bowl well what's that gonna clog up your grains and the rate of falling is going to change if the radioactive decay rate has changed in the past then the clock cap be used as a accurate timepiece and so again this requires an observer a geologist has a geologist being there for millions of years watching and measuring know we've only measured these decay rates in the laboratory in the last 80 years and I wanted to delve into this issue so actually did a series of papers that are available on our Answers in Genesis website at our answers research journal it's online published so it's free you don't have to subscribe and there's a whole series of papers on reviewing how the methods how the different decay rates were determined for the different isotopes and the problems that have have have resulted that have cropped up as a result of doing that so it's by no means even certain in the last 80 years that the decay rates have been constant in it there's hints and some of those measurements that it's only because they've assumed they had to be constant that they smoothed out the smoothed out the results so this we can sum up these three crucial assumption number one all the daughter realms derive from parent atoms or we know the initial conditions number two now other processes affected the parent daughter relationship and number three constant decay rates and I want to show you that none of these assumptions are provable why because the past cannot be observed and measured and can't be tested we weren't there in the past to be dogmatically assertive that these assumptions are all proven and correct so but the reality is that these assumptions are not even reasonable everyday experience just like explained to you about weathering and what rainfall does and what ground waters do how deep weathering goes shows you that these assumptions are not even reasonable and we know that daughter atoms may be inherited when the rock forms as I'll show and contamination subsequently is common now I want you to understand but the quality I'm not disputing the quality of the chemical analyses if you're even aware of these laboratory to do this work you will know that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for the equipment in well-constructed laboratories ultra clean rooms for preparation so you're talking about an investment of millions of dollars to set up one of these laboratories and so there's no question that that the state-of-the-art laboratories do wonderful chemical analyses I can send the same sample splits of the same sample for three different laboratories and I'll guarantee that they'll each hit about the same ball you know the same target with the chemical analyses that they produced but it's the interpretation of those chemical analyses you've got to then take those or chemical analyses and plug them into an equation for determining the age and that equation is built around these three assumptions so it's the assumptions that we're questioning that give the interpretation not the quality of their chemical analysis and that's a good point to emphasize they claim that they can overcome the problem of assumption number one the initial conditions by using the isochron method now I don't have time to go into great detail about that but the the normal model age what is called a model age is based on using one sample of a rock you get the chemical analysis and you plug it into the model age equation and so potassium-argon ages are usually model age equations model age model ages but also in this in the isochron method you use multiple samples and the idea is that in the same outcrop so so same rock unit if different outcrops might have different amounts of potassium in them you know potassium it depends on the amount of particular particular minerals how much biotypes in the granite or how much felspar of potassium feldspar is in the granite so different samples from the same rock unit will different amounts of potassium which means in theory they should have different amounts of argon in them as well and so when you plot that as potassium versus argon you're going to have a spread of data points and the line of best fit is the the isochron point isochron line which gives to the isochron age based on the isochron age equation which is the slope of that line but because you've got multiple samples and you've actually disturb raw der the wider the range of values of the parents and daughter will give you a better spread on your graph which will give you better statistics on your line of fit and so the isochron age and it and doesn't require knowing the initial conditions in fact you can you can effectively they claim work out the initial conditions by projecting projecting the isochron line back to to 0 so it seems to overcome the assumption number one and i say seems very deliberately because it really doesn't overcome that problem assumption number two is usually say we can we can show that where that's been violated because we can detect the we can contact look into contamination in the case of the isochron method any points that don't plot on the isochron line i assume to be due to contamination but how do you know that the lot the dots the the samples not the don't plot on the line they might actually be the true age the ones that line up on the isochron might be the contamination because it might be a mixing line and i'll show you an example of that later on it might be where you've distributed the composition based on the ground waters distributing it and you've got a mixing line so that doesn't help you just because you don't and also just because you don't condone to detect contamination doesn't mean it isn't present and i'm going to show you a beautiful isochron later but it's totally meaningless because it's a mixing line so let's let's go through these assumption number one no inheritance assumption number two no contamination assumption number three constant decay rates and that illustrate this that's the best way with with specific examples dr. Austin talked about mouths and Helens yesterday he didn't tell you though the store that the rest of the story after the main eruption of course which blew off the top of the mountain in the exposed crater lavas continued to is out and start to build a new lava dome and we watched it grew we knew when each of the lavas flew flowed out and so dr. Austin was dr. ken coming there from ICR they went up into the crater of Mount st. Helens there was a lava flow up there that we knew had had flowed out in 1986 we actually observed when this rock formed and so when it was sampled in 1996 it was ten years old okay so we knew the real time age of this Rock and had crystallized from the lava in 1986 sample and 90s ample din 1996 and central laboratory in 1996 so he knew the true age and here's the results that were obtained on a rock that had a real age of 10 years the potassium-argon model ages varied from the whole rock from point three five million years we separated different minerals and dated the minerals separately and so we in a Pyrrhic scene concentrate we've got an age up to 2.8 million years for a rock that was only ten years old and the answer was obvious well it had inherited excess argon in other words there was more argon in the rock than had come from radioactive decay that's what it's meant the star symbol is radiogenic or radio radioactive decay derived argon-40 because there's i don4t in the atmosphere as well and say you've got a factor that in when you do you do your chemical analysis and interpret it that's that's a whole different story so where did the extra argon come from well if you test the volcanic gases you know primarily steam but if you test the volcanic gases coming in a volcano they can they can contain argon-40 because that's how the atmosphere gets argon-40 so in other words when the lava cools what's it going to do it's going to trap in it some of these gases that are coming up in the volcano which include argon-40 so it's actually going to inherit argon-40 when the lava forms so if you come along and then assume that when you measure all the argon-40 in the rock it came from radioactive decay from potassium song you're gonna get the wrong answer because you haven't factored in this inheritance and so that is well known in the literature look at these results here from a Hawaiian lava which we saw the eruption in 1818 and one you get potassium-argon ages up to 1.4 to 1.6 million years old this is all from the literature Mount Etna the to two different eruptions there and you can see the ages and arrived Mount lassen in California and also sunset crater in Arizona that's the youngest youngest volcanic eruption in Arizona and you can see that all of these results derive from inheritance of excess arguments all in the literature it's been well-documented for 50 60 years in the literature that this is a common problem with recent lavas recent historic lavas will always give you will invariably give you many of them will give you excess argon and therefore wrong potassium argon ages so as I said before it begs the question if this is what we find with recent lava flows what does it mean with regard to the same method being used on ancient lava flows wouldn't they similarly have also inherited excess argon so therefore can we believe those ages as well here's another situation where in Hawaii they tested what happens when the lava erupts underwater the the outer skin of the larvae lobe of larvae that that's going out there is going to quickly cool and it's going to it's going to mushroom like a pillow the outer outer surface will cool very rapidly the while the inner serve in inside it takes a little bit longer and so that will affect how much argon can get trapped in the in the rock and so here they here they did a analysis from the rim of one of these pillows or these these lavas that had cooled rapidly under water and they looked at the date as you went in from this and so the date change these are centimeters so for translations purposes 2.5 sorry yeah 2.5 centimeters is an inch so we're talking about here four inches into the rot into the this lava flow cooled lava flow and so as you get into this pillow the rock actually gets younger because what happened is at the at the outer outer skin there cooled so rapidly it was able to quickly locked in all get all the argument that was available whereas in that in the inside as it cooled more slowly it didn't lock in as much helium so here's here's a table of and that's already published that's out of the first of the rate volumes the 2,000 volume which was a summary of the state of the art of the situation that we were in two gating in that project his the references out of where that came out of the literature another exam other more examples tens a year diamonds actually Zaire is no longer the name of a country and it's the Congo Republic but six ten diamonds yielded a potassium-argon isochron age of over six around six billion years well they immediately recognized that can't be true because how can diamonds that come outside from inside the earth be older than the earth itself if it's cleaned before and a half billion years old and so they immediately knew that these diamonds and somehow inherited excess are gone and sure enough you can find the fluid inclusions little fluid bubbles inside these diamonds and you analyze those and you find the excess are gone there so you know when we can when we can nail it down we can find out that this is a recurring problem no matter what the supposed age of the rock is so obviously these in diamonds inherited excess argon to volcanic centers 100 miles apart in the East African in the East African Rift Valley the lavas were supposed to be less than a million years old we knew that was Nam because of the interrelationships with other rocks that the they were in a layered with in the in the erupting away from the eruption centers but these two volcanic centers 100 miles apart samples from them plotted on a rubidium isochron that gave an age of seven hundred and seventy three million years so obviously they knew that this was a problem because these were recent lavas but a recurring problem 14 different recent ocean island basalts that is the salts on islands in the oceans that have recently erupted yield a rubidium strontium a isochron age of nearly two billion years and the same is true with lead lead lead our ages just to bring you up to speed a ladle age is by contrasting the lead derive from uranium 238 with the lead derive from uranium 235 it's supposed to be the premier way of dating using the uranium-lead dating method and so you can see here all the names of the different islands in the if these ores the Canaries the Easter Island you're familiar wine islands these that the lead lead ages are around one to two billion years and this has been known for over 50 years in the literature as a lead isotope paradox why is it these recent lava flows give such old ages and the answer is that they inherited from their mantle sources so as to do with the chemistry of the mantle not the age of the rock and that's well known in the literature so if that's the case with the recent lava flows what does it tell us about the ancient lava flows and we use this example yesterday we've got at the top of the Grand Canyon the year you incur it Plateau basalts this is the unit plateau the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in that area is called that you've got these these love these are domes craters that is something like 180 of them they're all lined up along fault zones cracks where the lavas came up and erupted and some of these the lavas flowed down into the into the Grand Canyon blocked the Colorado River and produced dammed up the river that then broke through and and so these are very young in fact there's some evidence that the most recent of these lavas were actually witnessed by the Native Americans so that means they're post Babel so here they are his falcons throne here's the colorado revoke the lavas flowed down here by the way the best rapid on the river which is the fastest navigable rapid North America is right here it's called lava falls rapid 19 seconds of sheer terror exactly if they're letting water out of the Glen Canyon Dam and a radar knots it's really a raging torrent so here the lavas filled in whole side canyons so down the bottom of the canyon we've got these Cardenas basalt lavas they're interbedded with these pre-cambrian sediments which I'm going to talk a bit more about on Thursday morning but these are pre flood rocks here's the beginning of the flood sequence which the horizontal layers that are fossil-bearing making up the canyon and so these are ancient by any man anyone's determination and very much young I very much older than these more recent lava flows that with work we're erupted after the canyon form so here are these Cardenas basalt lavas and so what they both give rubidium strontium isochron ages that are very similar and why is that well here's that here's the spread of you in current plateau basalt ages which is the correct age I said that yesterday obviously the a this is the ones the closest why is this why these so high well the Cardenas and the yeren create plateau basalts they're both basalts they didn't come from just beneath the Grand Canyon they came from deeper down in the upper mantle because the continental crust is granitic in composition the upper mantle is the salt 'ok so the melting of the upper mantle produced these lavas and so the answer is that these recent basalts inherited their old quote ages from the mantle source beneath the Grand Canyon the decay deenis basalt had previously come from the same mantle source and so it would yield the same rubidium strontium age I put aging quotation marks because these cannot be the true or real ages they are simply an artifice act of the mantle source of the mantle chemistry and why can I say that with good authority because that's the explanation for why the recent lava flows on those ocean Islands give billions of years ages the conventional community accepts that it's because of the inheritance from the mantle source well why doesn't it apply here also in the Grand Canyon well because they don't want it to apply the same but the evidence shows that it is the same methodology that we should and unreasoning that we should argue for why you get these artificially old ages that's simply because of the sort of the chemistry of the source so we'll quickly seeing that assumption number one no inheritance has been in violated because there is common inheritance in many of these examples that we've shown we've actually documented that inheritance is a major factor and just because we don't detect inheritance doesn't mean it isn't already there yes well no one has really assessed in the literature you know any any property you know a proportion what we do know is that whenever we observe we we know the true age of the rock the method fails and so that that should you know 100 percent of the time yeah yes yes and so that then begs the question or how why should we assume that it works when we don't have observational evidence of its true age so the next issue is contamination let's go to the North Island New Zealand Mountain era how I was made famous as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings series okay and here it is in the foreground Mount Ruapehu is is in the background it's still active mountain era how is the dormant since 1975 but prior to that it was New Zealand's most active volcano during during settlement bye-bye from by the British and here it is up close and personal and you can see that different colors some of these have been more overgrown than others that's why we can tell the ages in fact the because of observations of these lava flows we know we know the day the month and the year of each of the lava flows that came down the mountain in fact they've all been well documented and so it's very it's very easy to go in using the map using your observations to actually recognize which lava flow dates from from which which eruption so it was it was possible therefore to go in and get samples which I did and so a lot of these examples that I'm going to a number of these examples are going to give you or actually our own research and people say that we set up our own laboratory no we didn't do that we use the we use the conventional laboratories why because if we set up our own laboratory people wouldn't believe the results that we produced and that's still valid I think we have to be have to recognize that work within the system to show the problems so for lava flows that would date from 1949 1954 and 1975 we got I got potassium-argon model ages up to 3.5 million years obviously due to inheritance of argon-40 we get a rubidium strontium isochron age of 133 million years although notice that notice that there was a sorry there was a went the wrong way hang on going go back okay notice that there was a large error margin there and this is due to contamination it's well documented in the literature that there is a if you use these three n member isotopes you can calculate how much contamination there was from well from the fact that an and a site if you if you're familiar with the literature basalt is has low amount of silica in it and it's a larva most people don't realize that the underground equivalent is called a gabbro it's not a it's not a granite even though most black granite bench tops are actually gabbro they're not granite the other end of the spectrum is a granite which has a lot more silica in it a different chemistry it's it's larva or equivalent it's called rhyolite okay and between them there is a spectrum and so a basalt a basalt that's been contaminated is called an andesite and if it's contaminated a little bit more it's a de site so malson Helens was a de site eruption and then rhyolite the the as you go from the salt to rhyolite you get more explosive eruptions why because they're more viscous and therefore the steam builds up and you get more much more of an explosion that's why Mountain Helens was explosive compared to eruptions in Hawaii they're basalt where does the name andesite come from the Andes Mountains and so what happens is you have a basalt magma coming from the mantle it comes up through the crust it gets contaminated in this case five to ten percent contamination and that contamination changes the composition to an andesite and as a consequence of that contamination it's affected it's affected these radioisotope systems they're become contaminated here's a note some more examples of contamination a Greenwich Rock in South Africa yielded a lead lead Andra Samara nearly doom age of two point two thousand nine hundred and fifteen million years but a rubidium strontium isochron from minerals within the rock yield an age of two thousand and twenty three million years quite a significant difference how can the mineral in the rock date much younger than the whole rock being crushed so whole rock age is when you crush the whole rock and data a mineral ages when you separate the minerals and and date them one grain of our bike which is a felspar mineral in the rock Muller rubidium strontium ages of 5.8 billion years or 5800 52 million years at its outer edge and its core 3 3 billion or 3000 and 67 million years so it tells you that things are going on when these rocks crystallized and their minerals crystallized locking in the different elements as a result of what's available in them in the magma and so again it's it's contamination it's to do what's a with around at the time the rock forms here's another example of what can happen on this side of the screen we've got a granite that's supposedly 54 million years old its intruded into pre-cambrian shifts metamorphic s-- there's supposedly 137 3 1,000 surround 75 million years old and when we do some dating we find that the dates increase as you get away from the granite or decrease as you get to the granite and that's been due to the Granite's heat and also fluids hot water coming out of the granite and so here's that here's the graph here's that boundary there between the granite as that boundary there in the graph is here okay on this scale is the apparent age and here's the distance so we're talking a kilometer here we're talking of two miles out by two miles out you're getting that close to the supposed true age of the rock out here the host rock but as you go into the wards the granite the ages come all the way down close to the age of the granite these are the potassium argon rubidium strontium using different different minerals if we also look at it with the uranium ages the scale is different now we're now only down to 50 feet it hasn't been perturbed is much by distance but it shows you the heat and the fluids coming out of the granite can contaminate and therefore change these ages not because it's changed the decay rate but it's changed the parent/daughter relationship it's interfere with the concentrations of these isotopes and so if a little bit of heating water I can do that then what's happening out there in the outcrops that are being weathered by rainfall and ground waters here's another situation here we've got the granite in pink okay and within it we've got these zircon grains zircon is the cone iam silicate the element the metal zircon zircon zircon iam and combined with the silicate molecule and uranium has a similar atomic radius ionic radius and it will substitute into the lattice with some of those zurk on atoms and zircon therefore is a as a very hard mineral and it's become that the the showpiece for uranium-lead dating of rocks and yet here's a situation where we can show these zircon grains their claim to be inherited why in in many Granite's why well we get Dirk on Ages uranium lead ages up to seventeen hundred and fifty three million years in a Himalayan granite supposedly 21 million years old how come the zircon grains be hundreds of millions nay billions of years older than the rock itself well the argument is oh well the rock was crop has been inherited these er cons it came from when the magma form when previous rocks melted to produce this granite magma the zircon stay whole they didn't melt because they are high temperature and they were inherited in the rock well that's only an arbitrary explanation because we weren't there to see it happen zircons also crystallized from a magma and it's not as if it's a lone example here's another example a granite in southeastern Australia supposedly 426 million years but all based on rubidium strontium dating has urk on zircons within it with ages up to 3.5 billion years and another example here in New Zealand and granite supposedly 370 million years old has er con ages up to sixteen hundred and thirty-eight million years old but if that isn't bad enough look at this example where we got supposed monocyte is is a calcium phosphate mineral where you get substitution of uranium and thorium into it and a Himalayan granite supposedly 20 million years old has zircon grains through the uranium lead ages up to fourteen hundred and eighty-three million years but also has monocyte grains with uranium lead ages of minus ninety seven million years well what does that mean the minus ninety seven million years means the mono sign grains haven't yet formed but we met what we see them in the rock so you see how can this be a question of inheritance you can't inherit a great mineral grain before it forms it formed in the rock but at yields of minus 97 million your age so how can we be sure that these the zircon grains were also inherited no it tells you that what happens is that when the rock crystallizes these elements are partitioned into the different minerals that crystallize from the magma a magma is a molten liquid as it crystallizes different elements get petitioned into the different minerals that crystallize and so you've got unequaled an equal distribution of lead in relation to uranium because then you come along and you measure the uranium leader relationship if you assume that all the lead came from the uranium by radioactive decay you're wrong because to do with how much lead was petitioned into these minerals when they formed you get get my drift the minerals inherited more lead than they should have here's another example we have two grains side by side this line here is the edge between these grains and these stars represent argon-argon analyses this the the methodology is the the technical methodologies become so sophisticated we can produce an electron beam or an iron beam that's one micron in diameter and zap the surface of a mineral grain to obtain an age in on a spot one micron wide which means you can actually in this instance you can date different spots on this grain at the microscopic scale so taking this boundary here which is the edge between these two biotite grains biotite is the black mica it's common in Granite's and what do we get here's that here's that boundary here remember each of those stars represents an analysis point or they're numbered and so they're numbered in this one here so in Grain be this is analysis two three four five to twelve like we had before the distance is only a hundred microns in from the edge to the center in here notice that the edge the argon a argon age drops from five hundred fifteen million years at the edge down to one hundred sixty million years in inside and that's only a distance of a hundred microns I mean which is the true age of this this mineral grain does it mean that the edge inherited more argon well these are unanswered questions but obviously something's going on here did argon yeah it's not as if it leached out because you'd expect a lower age at the edge so it's a it's a real problem here's another example remember I said you can focus a beam one micron in diameter so that you can look at in this instance crystal faces they took crystals of the Dahlia which is the cone iam oxide from the Pala Bora mine in in South Africa and they they set up in the machine that they could rotate the crystal so as they rotated it you could actually put the beam on different faces but at different angles to the face you know it's at right angles this is an oblique angle this is close to right angles this is more an oblique okay and so you can plot the angle versus the age and so what do we get here's the here's the angles here's the ages as you rotate these crystals you get variations of several hundred million years depending on the angle of the beam to the face so what does that tell you about the ages they're meaningless because it depends on the angle of your beam to your mineral so when you actually get a rock where you've got a flat surface will always different grains in that you're analyzing how do you know the angle of the beam to the the crystal because you've you've cut your rock to get a flat surface you don't know the angle so how do you know that you're your sample you're getting the correct ages so numerous examples show that other processes have affected the parent/daughter relationship so assumption number two is in violated by contamination what about number three is it since it is insisted that assumption number three constant that decay rates is universally true in the conventional literature that's the sacrosanct sacrosanct assumption why because the result majors give us the millions of years that are needed for evolution to be true that's why this age issue matters as soon as you say that the age of the earth young then there's no time for evolution and the Bible has to be true and there has to be a creator and therefore we're all sinners in need of repentance that's what they fight against it's ultimately a spiritual issue this time question but why should radioactive decay rates have always been constant at today's measured rates has sedimentation always been at the slow rates we see today no during the flood they were catastrophic so if you had catastrophic sedimentation and erosion catastrophic plate tectonics why not catastrophic radioactive decay during the during the flood for example that would be a logical expectation well here are the four major methods again that he used potassium to argon rubidium strontium uranium and let some air in there dim now most geologists usually only one use one or two of these methods on the same rock because it's assumed that all methods should ideally yield you're the same age why well as I said yesterday it's like having four different hourglass clocks on the bench here but put different sized red sand grains in the top they'll all still fall to the bottom to give you green sand grains but the clock should all tick for one hour just in spite of the different sizes of the sand grains was true with radiometric clocks is in theory no matter which clock you used on a rock a given drop it should give you the same age so we decide that we're going to test this because there were hints in the literature that this was not true and so we decided that we would we would use all four methods on the same rocks and would use multiple samples would use this superior isochron method so it was harder for our opponents to argue against us and that would that matter it would help our cause and so we went to the Grand Canyon those were the days when it was easier to get a sampling permit and we decided to look for different rock units that were datable here we have it what we call a dive a sill this is where a basaltic magma hasn't reached it all the way to the surface and instead it moves out laterally underground between two other rock units we call it a silt and the resultant Rock is a diabase it's a basalt that's got larger crystals similar composition it's given a different name it's called a dye base and it's right here at Hance Rapids then we here's another example down at Bass Rapids we've got this one is much much thicker in fact this is it was ideal because see this pink rock at the top that's actually a granitic rock but it's part of this same sill what happened as the magma came in it cooled slowly enough that the denser heavier grains of olivine sank to the bottom and the lighter grains of potassium feldspar rose to the top and so there's a chemical differentiation of the rock through its thickness which means there's a spread of chemistry which will give you a better isochron because I said before the broader the range of chemistry in your samples the Betty has statistics and so that's what it ideal and so here's the best Rapids daibo still down here that's right down deep in the canaanites pre-cambrian and so here's the results that we got potassium-argon 840 1.5 million years rubidium strontium 1060 million years lead led 1250 million years Samara needed in 1307 nine million years which is the correct stance and what about e none of the above how would we know if there was something reserve of it and the answer is they're probably all wrong but notice that the potassium and rubidium are younger than the lead and samarium and the potassium is younger than the rubidium watch that because we move on to the next example the Cardenas basalt lava flows that we talked about before the spill erupted onto the surface and there's a succession of about six or seven of these lava flows we can go in and sample them and here's a boundary between two of these flows is a younger looking doctor Steve Austin and there's where they are in the canyon down here in the in the Precambrian and here's the results potassium-argon 516 million years the youngest rubidium strontium 1111 million years the second youngest and potassium is younger than rubidium and Samara Newton him fifteen hundred eight million years which is the correct one how would we know without their as an observer now I want you to notice not only there's a pattern here in the ages but notice that the samarium is three times the size of the potassium age I mean how accurate is that when you get a three hundred percent difference in the ages not very accurate at all down the bottom of the Grand Canyon we have where the salts basalt lava flows under temperature and pressure metamorphosed into what we call a nymph it alight it comes from the major mineral in the rock called an alpha Bowl and so the rock is called an amphib align and they're black looking rocks like this and you can actually see here's the boundary between original lava flows and here they are they're down in the so called metamorphic complex which has been subdivided now into given different names Vishnu is just one of the names years down there in the metamorphic rocks but they're really early on in the history of the canyon and we'll talk about where this fits into Earth history from a biblical perspective on Thursday morning here's the results rubidium twelve hundred and fifty forty million years lead 1883 many years samarium one thousand six hundred fifty five million years notice again rubidium is younger none of the above which one is correct how we know without an observer well example number four else chasm grana diet regarded as the oldest rock in the Grand Canyon traditionally one point eight four 1.85 billion years and what results did we obtain on this rock here it is we're right down here in a relative sense rubidium fifteen hundred and twelve million years lead led 1930 three million years samarium forty 16 hundred and sixty-four million years which is the correct age how we know without an observer while I all of this is documented in the second volume of the r8 project the 2005 volume and again notice the systematic pattern rubidium is the youngest the beta decays give younger ages and so once you know there's a cyst this pattern that's one of the things I'm interested in when I'm looking at the big picture ah I want to get a heap of data you know some people like one or two pieces of data I like thousands or millions of data and then I go looking for patterns and then I have to say to myself what do these patterns mean but not in context of the conventional paradigm but in terms of the biblical view of Earth history and so there's something systematic going on here what could cause it well the answer is each of these methods disagree but they each refer to a unique once only geologic event the formation of a silt the metamorphism the lavas a volcanic eruption or the crystallization of a ground that was a unique once only event when the rock formed so if these clocks are accurate all ticking at the same rates as they are measured today they should have all given the same age so if they give you different ages what does that tell you they may be ticking at different rates in the past and different faster rates why do I say that well if you look at the cárdenas basalt while the I got potassium clock ticks through you know you've got a real you've got a real time period between when the rock formed and when we measure it today that's the real time period during that same real time period the potassium clock ticked through five hundred and sixteen million years the rubidium clock to click through 1111 million years and the Samarin clock ticks through 1588 million years so in other words that are ticking at different faster rates why were they ticking at different faster rates because one they were alpha decays and beta so there has to be some difference between that and also they were different they had different atomic weights potassium is the smallest atomic weight it gives you the younger stages so we could we line it up and you can see there's a pattern according to atomic weight there was also a pattern according to the the length of the present decay rate the shortest decay rate in the present is potassium gave the younger ages the larger decay rates the slower decay rates that is gave bigger ages in the past because they were they were accelerated by a greater amount so that invariably tells us that the clocks were speeded up during some catastrophic event during the past and so therefore if the the K rate was accelerated in the past if we assume a constant rate of decay that our clocks are not going to give us accurate absolute ages absolute ages now do isochrones always represent ages you know these straight lines where we've got multiple samples and you get the the slope of the line gives you the age well the isochrones straight sloping lines based on chemical analyses of four or more different samples from the same rock unit by the way I should have added that when we did the dating in the Grand Canyon we use more than four or five samples the best rappers die basal was 11 samples the amphib alights were over 20 samples so that really improves the statistics of your isochron the slope of the isochron is claimed to represent the age of the earth though the age of the rock but do those straight lines always represent ages well let me give you an example this was the area where I did my PhD thesis research and the Garrett this is this is the if you ever saw the moon the Crocodile Dundee this is Crocodile Dundee country it's up in the what we call the alligator Rivers province it's the name of the rivers and yes they're not alligators they're crocodiles there's saltwater crocodiles and they're man-eaters and this is now a national park and a World Heritage listed area but in the nineteen late 1960s uranium was discovered and it put the Americans out of business because these were high grade uranium deposits and one of those that was discovered was a kangaroo Urena deposit it hasn't been mined yet because it's the it's in a national park and the land was also handed back to the traditional owners the aboriginals the native Australians and so I did my PhD work there here's a very famous location this is a lake or sorry a pond that's you have the wet season in the tropics where you get a lot of flooding and then it dries out and you get these ponds and this is this is a famous cliff face that's very popular very scenic here's an aerial view of the uranium deposit now this is the the the road that was put in and this is the drilling grid the uranium deposit is in this direction here and we drilled through cross-sections here to obtain to prove up the the uranium posit this is what the uranium ore looks like the black is pitch blende or you ran a night and it's been altered with oxidation would by fluids you get kaizo light is orange it's urinal silicate glass site is the yellow one and so a friend of mine I was involved in this project and we wanted to use what was in the ground as an analogue for how we would explore in other areas to find other deposits okay so we're developing exploration techniques we decided to look at uranium isotopes in soils so we took soil samples from over the uranium deposit and sure enough you got a signature from uranium decay let a lot of lead from uranium decay then we side of a mountain in a different host and a different rock unit and we got all these soil samples and we plotted them and lo and behold they put on isochron line but these were soil samples in actual fact the closer to the uranium mineralization the closer we got to the signature from the ore deposit so this was only in a paradise for corn it was actually a mixing line it had nothing to do with the age of the soils it had to do with the amount of uranium oh sorry the amount of uranium and therefore the amount of lead that was in these soils by ground waters moving the material and moving these isotopes around so just because you get a lovely aiesec right and this had wonderful statistics and we published this in in the open conventional literature so you saw I can talk about research that we've actually done the guys that were working with me on this work with work with the government research agency called the CSIRO in Australia here's another example from the literature where you can take the strontium and need any isotopes of in Granite's in southeastern Australia and shows that they sit along a mixing line which is mixing of a mantle component in the granite in the Granite's and a crustal component so yeah this has nothing to do with the ages of the rocks and yet strontium and near deme are the end members of two radioactive decay clocks that are used to date these Granite's and yet we can show that these daughters actually plot along a mixing line so assumption number three is violated by accelerated decay rates and mixing so where does this lead us the three crucial socialness of what radioactive day methods depend all have been all shown to be unsustainable and unreasonable inheritance and contamination rocks are common when they can be detected which begs the question as to how can we be sure that they are not also common in rocks of unknown age inherit and contamination and the answer is of course we can't be sure there wasn't an observer to test when the rock was formed how can we be sure decay rates have been shown not to have been constant but have been accelerated during some past catastrophic event and I might add here as a side note if you're familiar with the results of the r8 project the radioisotopes on age of the earth project there were several lines of evidence that converged on that conclusion it wasn't just these discordant what we call discordant or disagreeing radioactive radioactive ages that i've shown you in this presentation but there was also the helium leakage there was also efficient tracks that also so radio halos and I would come back to on tomorrow afternoon or show that the K rates had to have been accelerated in the past so it's not just based on the examples I've given you here this morning it's based on several lines of evidence that converged on the same conclusion and we've shown that apparent isochrones can also be mixing lines thus all the radioactive dating methods are subject to the same uncertainties inheritance contamination and non constant decay rates make all the radioactive decay methods totally unreliable therefore they cannot yield provide for us absolute ages for rocks and meteorites implications however come from out of this and stay with me the result millions of years ages though unreliable and highly inflated to compared to the biblical timescale frame can still give us a relative order of relative ages in the rock units data they still match the relative order you know all those samples from the Grand Canyon come from what we call the Precambrian and they all yielded pre-cambrian ages apart from the 516 million year age for the class immigrant age for the Cardenas basalt in other words they match well that's because the time scale was built from radioactive just but you still you still hit the target in terms of where in the geologic column the samples come from and so that gives you a clue that even though the absolute ages are wrong you can still use the methodology when you have an unknown Rock you can test it for radioactive decay ages and that will help you give a relative age of where it fits in the geologic column or where it fits in the order of Earth history from a biblical perspective so here on this graph we can see that many of the accepted radioisotope ages do in fact match the relative order of the strata here's where they match along this line here you got lots of outliers sure but you've got a lot that match so why would that be important so where the relative ages of strata 11 or cannot determine relations then radioisotope ages might be a relative guide why do I say that well as I said that in our rate project we found five independent lines of evidence the systematic discordant radio isotope ages helium diffusion or leakage leakage radio halos fishing tracks and radiocarbon I didn't mention before but we'll come back back to that in the next session they demonstrate radioactive decay rates must have been grossly accelerated during one or more recent catastrophic jeweler geologic events especially the flood so if radioactive decay was grossly accelerated during the flood then even though the ages of radio ADIF later inflated they should yield relative ages in the in the correct order why well a rock that was a larva that was erupted in the first month of the flood during the flood would go 12 through 12 months a year of accumulation of daughters at an accelerated rate whereas a lava flow that erupted in the last month of the flood would only accumulate one month's worth of accelerated daughter products so when you do that when you these rocks this rock should give an older age because it's had 12 months worth of rapidly accumulated daughters and this one should give a younger age because it's only got one month's worth rapidly accumulated daughters and so that tells us how we can use these as a relative age not absolute but relative ages and of some summarized that they're in that same the deeper a volcanic layer in the geologic record the more time for accelerator active decay so the more daughter isotopes it will have accumulated during the flood year thus these methods may often not always be a guide to relative ages of strata because earlier and older layers would have experienced more accelerated decay and thus accumulated more daughters and thus would give you older ages if the decay acceleration factors for each long age radioactive the parent daughter isotope system could be determined then the correct absolute ages might be even calculated using these correction factors I mean that's a that's a wild hope that we can see before that there's also contamination inheritance that will affect the resultant age so we have to be careful of that the point is I want to make is we don't have to fear radiometric dating as a foe but rather treat it as a friend Albert it's a tool to provide relative not absolute ages and we can use it also to provenance that is to find out the origin or the geographic origin of a sample by looking at its its isotopes so that's where I finished for this for this first session any questions before we go into the break

Channel: Is Genesis History?

Views: 45,445

Rating: 4.7680473 out of 5

Keywords: radioisotope dating, andrew snelling, creation, radiometric, dating, basalt, granite, radioactive

Id: z1lBdLVyzzo

Length: 79min 54sec (4794 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2017