Age Correlations, step by step.

For 'relative' (from {Is creationism winning in Turkey & Korea?} thread): Okay. Let's take it one step at a time, with step 1 being:

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Bristlecone Pines

By counting tree rings and matching the overlapping patterns of growth from live to dead trees, scientists have developed a tree-ring chronology of nearly 10,000 years using wood from the Schulman Grove area, California (one tree still living is 4600 years old). Quotes from the Bristlecone pine website:

The oldest known living specimen is the "Methuselah" tree, sampled by Schulman and Harlan in the White Mountains of CA, for which 4789 years are verified by crossdating. An age of 4,844 years was determined post-mortem (after being cut down) for specimen WPM-114 from Wheeler Peak, NV.

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Pinus longaeva is generally regarded as the longest-lived of all sexually reproducing, nonclonal species, with many individuals known to have ages exceeding 4000 years. Due to the resinous wood and extremely cold and arid habitat, decay of dead wood is extremely slow, and wood on the ground in some stands has ages exceeding 10,000 years. This has permitted building a continuous chronology of more than 8,000 years, which in turn has been used to calibrate the radiocarbon timescale. The species has been widely used in dendroclimatic reconstruction and in several classic studies of timberline ecology.

The "Methusulah" specimen was cut down in 1957, so by this one tree alone the minimum age for the earth is 4,836 years (and counting). Another site with Bristlecone Pine data is Great Basin National Park:

The Forest Service granted permission for the researcher to take core samples from several old-looking bristlecone pines and to cut one down. Bristlecone pines often grow in a twisted fashion. Also, one section of the tree may die off even a couple thousand years before another part. This means it can be very difficult to capture the oldest part of the tree in a core sample. The tree that was cut down in 1964--while still living--has since become know to some as "Prometheus."

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Counting revealed that Prometheus contained about 4,900 growth rings. This made it the oldest known tree. Currently the oldest known living tree, about 4,600 years old, is in the White Mountains of California. Chances are good that there are other, older, bristlecones that have not been dated.

Also see "The Ancient Bristlecone Pine"
and "California's Ancient Bristlecone Pines, the Oldest Living Things"

Minimum age of the earth = 8,000 years based on this data.

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Notice three things:(1) a single tree that was 4,844 years old when cut down in 1957,(2) a continuous chronology for 8,000 years with no evidence of disruption(3) multiple specimens that all give the same results.How can this occur and NOT be consistent annual rings for the duration of the record?When we have a valid hypothesis for this occurance we can move on to the next correlation item, and test the hypothesis.Enjoy.

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admins may chose to move this to be a "great debate" if (a) 'relative' takes up the challenge and (b) the thread gets overly cluttered with other posts.

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{edited email notifications, no change to post}This message has been edited by RAZD, 05*05*2006 07:11 PM

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quote:

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Bristlecone Pines
By counting tree rings ..

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In the bible, trees grew in days. What more can I say? Tree rings therefore in the deep past are of no meaning relating to actual time. In the present, this is not the case, of course.P.S. I might add here, that science can not say a single thing about this.This message has been edited by relative, 05-02-2006 12:58 AM

Thread moved here from the Coffee House forum.

No a tree can not grow to full size in a few days trees are bound by the fundimental rules of the universe , and to grow involes a massive number of chemical reactions driven by energy exchanges , starting from the action of sunlight on chlorophyl .. ..now there are many limiting factors which mean these reaction can only go at a certain pace , never enought to grow a full sized tree in a few days .. this is sciencefurther a tree ring is a annual growth effect , the boundry being the winter where the tree is dorment and not growing , so if the tree got to full size in a few days you would have one massive tree ring form at the end of the growing year , this ring would be the diameter of the trunk and would clearly stand out from all rings from later years ... seen any examples of this ???perhaps what you should have said is .. in the bible the actions of ( insert your preferd term )caused trees to become full grown , by passing the normal methods of growth , taking the tree outside its natural cycle .now this may have occured .. i was not there so i dont know .., but it does not invalidate tree rings as a measurement system , as it is a total different type of event , with different causes .btw if a tree falls and no one hears it , its cos they are not paying enough attention ...

'relative' complained that the original thread was in a science forum and "the deck was stacked" there, and requested that it be discussed in the coffee forum.moving this thread to a science forum defeats that purposewe already have the original thread in the dates and dating forum so this duplication would not be necessary there either

Why do you believe this?

Again this comes back to the whole 'God want us to think the Earth is old' issue. Tree rings are not a feature of tree growth - they are a feature of growth that spans multiple seasons. Winter = slower growth, less nutrients = dark ring. Summer = faster growth, more nutrients = light ring. If a tree was to grow in a few days it would be one solid light ring. The only way to explain otherwise is that God wanted us to believe that the Earth is older then it actually is. So, now we have a deceiving God. Not really the kind of diety that the the bible talks about any more, so we are stuck in a catch-22.

(from {Is creationism winning in Turkey & Korea?} thread): I know you are uncomfortable in a science forum, where this has now been moved.If you agree we can have the original coffeehouse discussion moved to {The Great Debate} forum, where we can agree not to use the "rules" of the science forums, and where debate is limited to one-on-one (just you and me).I would be happy to respond to your post there.

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Actually, it is just because my research indicates that the moderation here is bad. If no one posts beyond the post that kills my ability to post, or where I may get axed, fine, I can go to there. I really do not want to be silenced, while all the opposition rants on unopposed here. Deal?

quote:

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Again this comes back to the whole 'God want us to think the Earth is old' issue. Tree rings are not a feature of tree growth - they are a feature of growth that spans multiple seasons.

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Yes they are. And this is science. Now, what science can you bring to bear that shows the past and future will also be like this?

I am not allowed to say. This is a science forum. SCience is limited to the recent past and present observations. It can't go there.

What are you talking about? This is nonsense. Science isn't limited to those things at all.I recommend you take the time to actually learn a lot more about science.(Hint: We can observe light that left it's destination millions of years ago every day.... Ever heard of red shift?)

Present observations of how it works are fine for the present. You need to connect the dots. Why is the past and future also bound by this, precisely?I have some ideas why, such as the different light of the past, but science is too limited to help us there.

Do you mean to imply that in the past what we now consider to be the physical laws and constants of the unviverse where different , that the unviverse opertated on a different set of rules ..
Thus the properties of ..say.. a tree.. and how it grew where total different thus fitting the "facts " in the bible of trees growing in a few days WITH a full set of tree rings ?If so you must be able to show how the laws and constants changed .. dare i say evoled .. over time .... was this a natural process or was a outside agentcy involed .. beacaue if you use the outside agency to make the changes you get back to ... cos he/she wills it to happen ..note a tree grown in a universe with different laws and constants would not be viable in our current universe .. it would not be able to follow our rules ..

okay. The problems with this are:(1) When did the transition happen? The tree rings mentioned above do not show any discontinuity in their growth patterns.(2) Ancient and modern corals show growth patterns with two levels -- days and years. This is from the original {Age Correlations}:

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Talking Coral Heads

Now we are going to introduce a twist. Coral heads put down growth layers just like trees and other organic systems.From Estimating past sea-surface temperatures from corals:

Some species of corals have stony skeletons, consisting almost entirely of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), and the term coral is often applied to the skeletons themselves.... There are three kinds of this skeletal material, i.e. plate-like, branching, and 'massive' The last is rounded and bulky and proves to be useful for estimating past sea-surface temperatures (SST) in tropical regions.

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X-ray examination reveals that massive coral has layers of different density, due to seasonal variations, like the annual rings of tree trunks. Counting of the density layers in large colonies of coral provides annual dating of the layers for several hundreds of years. Massive coral cores of the Porites type on Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR) have been dated back to 1479 AD.

So where's the twist? Those dates are pretty insignificant compared to the other data, right? The twist comes from ancient corals. Sure, one can assemble all the coral cores and align them by seasonal variations and piece together a database similar to the tree ring data bases we started with, but as it sits now there are not enough cores to assemble without significant gaps in between (I fully expect a complete database to be assembled over time).For now we can assemble the bits and pieces, placing the ancient cores by dates derived from radiometric testing (T-230 and P-231 are used for some), and while we can derive similar dates from two or more tests, this is hardly enough to impress people who doubt radiometric dating methods. Is there something else that will give us an independent confirmation?The answer is yes, and it comes from the astrophysics of the earth-moon system. From CoralGrowth and Geochronometry (Nature, March 9, 1963 By Prof. John W. Wells):

The other approach, radically different, involves the astronomical record. Astronomers seem to be generally agreed that while the period of the Earth's revolution around the Sun has been constant, its period of rotation on its polar axis, at present 24 h, has not been constant throughout Earth's history, and that there has been a deceleration attributable to the dissipation of rotational energy by tidal forces on the surface and in the interior, a slow-down of about 2 sec per 100,000 years according to the most recent estimates. It thus appears that the length of the day has been increasing throughout geological time and that the number of days in the year has been decreasing. At, the beginning of the Cambrian the length of the day would have been 21 h ...

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The best of the limited fossil material I have examined so far is from the MiddleDevonian ... Diurnal and annual growth-rates vary in the same individual, adding to the complexity, but in every instance there are more than 365 growth -lines per annum. usually about 400, ranging between extremes of 385 and 410. It is probably too much, considering the crudity of these data, to expect a narrower range of values for the number of days in a year in the Middle Devonian; many more measurements will be necessary to refine them.

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A few more data may be mentioned: Lophophllidium from the Pennsylvanian (Conemaugh) of western Pennsylvania gave 390 lines per annum, and Caninia from the Pennsylvanian of Texas, 385. These results imply that the number of days a year has decreased with the passage of time since the Devonian, as postulated by astronomers.

The calculations based on just the astrophysics gives a 400 day/year figure for the Devonian and a 390 day/year figure for the Pennsylvanian, so there is very close accord between the predicted number of days, the measured number of days and the measured age of the fossil corals. These corals will be useful in anchoring the database of annual layers as it builds up a picture of climate change with age and extending, eventually, back into the Devonian period (360 to 408.5 million years ago).

Probable Minimum age of the earth = 400,000,000 years based on this data.

At this point we have moved from hard evidence of actual years into inferred evidence, waiting for the hard evidence to fill in the gaps. As this is also a biological bit of evidence we can also say that the (inferred) probable minimum age of life on earth is 400 million years.

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So how do you explain the appearance of daily growth rings at a time when the annual growth rings are suppossedly daily growth rings?Without explaining this, your {ancient day = modern year} hypothesis is invalidated.Enjoy.

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