New helium retention work suggests young earth and accelerated decay

--Thought your questions seemed very interesting so:"Why was the amount of acceleration greatest in layers deposited first by the flood, gradually declining with each additional layer?"
--In this thread, me and tranquility had a brief discussion & one question was very similar so it may be best just to quote:- http://EvC Forum: Creationist only flood topic? / Young Earth vs. Old Earth id's? -->EvC Forum: Creationist only flood topic? / Young Earth vs. Old Earth id's?

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"Tell me a little about 'chemical fractination' of the bedrock. What do you mean by 'This geochemical process also plays a roll in the veracity of radioisotopic dating'. I find it an intgeresting idea that the isotopes distibutions were/are not random and were designed to enable the insitigation of the creation day 3 event and the flood."
--Yes the geochemical processes in the mantle may play an increasingly large role in the distribution of radioisotopes in the crust. Catastrophic plate tectonics predicts at least that the Cambrian+ sediments were produced during a short period of time as well as that today's orogenic developments and the topography generated by the activity was produced by it. We obviously see a relatively linear flow in the loss of parent isotopes as you increase in depth in the earth. We also see the same linear observation in sea-floor crust spreading outward from sea-floor spreading regions. There was some mechanism which as mantle materials were extruded out from inside the earth that lessening amounts of isotopes are found in older materials than newer ones.
--Of course the majority of chemical fractionation of continental plates were formed in pre-Cambrian rocks which we attribute to the first few creation days or spans of time so we would expect essentially higher magnitudes of anomalies in isotopic compositions than more recent materials/Cambrian+ rock.
--While the initial distribution of isotopes are particularly vague the further you back into the formation of the earth and mantle, we know that it has undergone this process of sorting of isotopes according to their tendency of concentration whether it be the atmosphere, the silicate earth, or the earths core etc.

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"Why isn't there a clear discontinuity in radiometric age between the lowest layers of the flood and the preexisting layers upon which flood deposits were laid?"
--The above quote also may explain this, deposited sediments lower in the geologic column would have had a longer time to produce higher quantities of daughter isotopes. Of course there will be discontinuities, which are found quite often as anomalies. They are contaminations from various mechanisms such as fluid lavas flowing underground over a long period of time may separate concentrations of Parent isotopes from daughter concentrations before it cools into basalt. Even mainstream studies have more than enough examples of similar events of contamination, we cope with it expectantly."Why was the effect local to the earth and not detectable in any astronomical evidence from electromagnetic radiation emitting objects 5,000 to 10,000 light years away?"
--I'd have to do more research on this question than I could a lot for myself at this time as I don't really hold a sufficient understanding of the mechanics of radioisotopic emission of radiation in a cosmological sense. Though I would suspect that if such an observation should be observed, that we may have detected it & perceived it as something else."How did life survive the neutron bombardment from billions of years of radiometric decay occurring in a single year?"
--I don't think I can agree with TB's notion that it played a roll in causing decreased life-spans, I would argue that it is very much genetic, but that's another discussion there. I would however note, that as is explained a bit in my quote above, as well as my post #10 here:http://EvC Forum: Creationist only flood topic? / Young Earth vs. Old Earth id's? -->EvC Forum: Creationist only flood topic? / Young Earth vs. Old Earth id's?--..that as I accept the model, the supposed flood acceleration had much less decay than billions of years. If memory serves me right, the RATE group suggests .5 Ga & it seems very reasonable considering the radioisotopic data through the GC (Ages for eras, periods, epochs, etc.)."How did the earth avoid melting from the billions of years of radiometric decay occurring in a single year?"
--See above, & we also may very well require the period of accelerated decay as the initial reason there was a geologic catastrophe. So we may not have had enough to turn the earth into a molten ball as did happened during creation, though I do believe there was enough to increase tectonic activity to produce what we observe throughout the geologic record.------------------[This message has been edited by TrueCreation, 11-01-2002]

"Actually, Percy is right. If the first layer suddenly radiodecays at rates millions(?) of times faster than the the previous layers, then it should have a starkly different age than the Precambrian rocks. Contamination or no. Face it, any process accelerated to the degree that you are talking is going to leave tracks a mile wide."
--Yes they would have a starkly different age than Precambrian, I am not arguing that if accelerated decay occurred that it only effected newly deposited sediments such as Cambrian+. Below Parent isotopes would be decaying at the same accelerated rate as above. I do not require that contamination be at all the reason we see this correlation. I fail to see why lower strata should have an apparent age to any degree younger than a latterly deposited sedimentary layer."So, you say that it is okay for you to have contamination, but for us it's not?"
--Of course not, I am saying exactly what I said, 'even mainstream studies have more than enough examples of similar events of contamination, we cope with it expectantly.' Whether the mainstream obtains successful hypotheses pertaining to such contaminations is not an argument I have made business with at all."But you have to account for billions of years of error. Why would there be less material to decay under your scenario?"
--Continental crust is the product of partial melting of less differentiated rock. Pre-Cambrian sediments I attribute as pre-flood. Therefore we can deduce that by the geochemical data that about .5Ga - .6Ga or so [in this depositional model] has decayed since Cambrian sediments were laid down."Man, I hope that I never hear the argument from you that evolution is based on assumptions!"
--If you were to, it would not be in the ridiculous form you see it 'explained' to you by many ill-informed YEC's you might come across."Well then show us some kind of calculations that indicate this. You are way off the speculation meter, TC."
--Yes I admit it is based conjecture (I wouldn't think you wouldn't notice it!), though I did not mean it to be sophistry of any kind, it is an unscritinized premise from which I would develop a coherent notion. Yes calculations would be wonderful. I am unable to give them now, though I will see what I can do. I need some time to critically examine my recent readings of the Heat Transfer section of T & S - Geodynamics.------------------

"No, it is a way of showing that [He] is not a very good clock."
--I wouldn't expect dating by He diffusion to be a reliable 'clock', though it could serve as a relative dating method. Tranquility and the RATE team seems to make the claim that the analysis is not cooperative with such 'Ga' scale ages given by isotopic measurements. Of course this is my assertion made without considering what the data actually does say about He diffusion.------------------

"Somebody throw me a line..."
--I hope I don't get nailed for copyright infringment or something along that line, but these pages seem to be relevant:--Pgs 344-350; Radioisotopes & the age of the earth, Humphreys, 'Accelerated Nuclear Decay: A viable Hypothesis?'----------------->6. Helium retention supports fast nuclear decayOne of the strongest pieces of evidence I know of for accelerated decay is the high retention of radiogenic ⁴He in microstopic zircons. Figure 5 summarizes the data [Gentry et al., 1982b]. These zircons, about 75 microns long, are embedded in crystals of biotite (black mica). In turn, the biotite is embedded in hot Precambrian basement granodiorite (granitic rock) below the Jemez volcanic caldera near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Radioisotopic (Pb-Pb) dating of zircons recovered from deep boreholes in the formation give an age of "1.5 billion years" [Zartman, 1979].The surprising thing is this: although these zircons are tiny and were in hot rock, they have retained very large percentages of the 4He which the radioactive atoms in the zircons would have emitted by alpha-decay at normal rates over the alleged 1.5 billion years, as Table 3 shows. This is surprising to evolutionists because, over a billion years, they would expect most of the He to escape such small zircons by diffusion (He atoms wriggling through the crystal lattice), especially at high temperatures.Diffusion rates of radiogenic He through bare zircons, not embedded in other crystals, have been measured, as Figure 6 shows [Magomedov, 1970]. Those rates are too fast to retain the He for more than a few decades even at room temperatures. However, the biotite crystals in which the Jemez zircons were embedded could "bottle up" the He in the zircons, causing longer retention times. So the real question is: how fast does He diffuse through biotite?Unfortunately, I have found no measurement in the literature of He diffusion in biotite. However, there are measurements of argon diffusion in biotite, at least for high temperatures [Grove and Harrison, 1996]. Like He, Ar is a noble gas which does not chemically bond to other atoms. Argon atoms are larger and heavier than He atoms, so we would expect He to diffuse through a given material faster than Ar. That is, we can scale diffusion rates in any given mineral from the size and mass of the diffusing atoms [Fortier and Gilletti, 1989]. Argon and helium measurements on other materials support such scaling [Carrol, 1991]. From those data we can very roughly extrapolate the Ar-in-biotite data to He-in-biotite, getting a band of estimated He diffusion rates for biotite.We can then compare the scaled He-in-biotite rates to two simple models for the Jemez He retention:-Evolution model--steady low-rate radioactive decay, He production, and He diffusion for 1.5 billion years at today's temperatures in the formation.
-Creation model--a short burst of high-rate radioactive decay and He production, followed by 6000 years of He diffusion at today's temperatures in the formation.Next we can plug each of these models into the well-understood equations for diffusion [Carslaw and Jaeger, 1959, pp. 256-257]. For simplicity, I assume the zircons to be He-filled spherical cavities in the biotite. The cavity diameters are 44 microns, to match the surface areas of the zircons. Then for each temperature, I calculate what diffusion coefficient in the biotite is necessary to get the observed percent He retention in the zircons during the time allotted by each of the two models. Figure 7 exhibits the calculated model-required diffusion coefficients and their dependence on temperature. The small squares and finely dotted line show the He diffusion rates in biotite required by the evolution model to get the observed Jemez He retentions. The small filled circles and solid line show the He-in-biotite rates required by the Creation model to get the observed He retentions. The solid line at the left shows the observed high-temperature data for Ar in biotite. The dashed line joined to the solid line qualitatively shows the expected behavior of the low-temperature Ar data, excluding the effect of defects and impurities, which would reduce the slope of the right-hand part of the dashed line [Girifalco, 1964, p. 102]. The shaded band shows the estimated He-in-biotite data, and the Ar/He data in other minerals, especially muscovite [Lippolt and Weigel, 1988].The exciting thing about Figure 7 is this: the shaded band overlaps the Creation model and is far above the evolution model. That is, our estimates of what the experimental He-in-biotite rates should be are entirely consistent with a burst of accelerated nuclear decay only thousands of years ago. Moreover, the estimates exclude, by many orders of magnitude, the evolution model. That is, if the formation were really 1.5 billion years old, most of the He should have diffused out of the zircons.Of course, estimates are not as good as experiments. I propose that careful experimental measurements be done on He diffusion in the actual Jemez biotites. We can take the "He Creation Model" line in Figure 7 as an approximate prediction of what the experimental results would be if accelerated decay occurred. I say "approximate" because my Creation model is very simple. For example, it does not take account of possible changes in the formation temperature with time, nor does it take into account that the time since the burst of decay might be only 4300 years (from the Flood) instead of 6000 years (from Creation). But I would expect the simple Creation model to be within an order of magnitude of future experimental results if the accelerated decay hypothesis is correct.The evoluiton model I have used is also very simple; for example, it also does not account for temperature variations in the formation. But since the evolution model differs from the estimated He-in-biotite rates by four to five orders of magnitude, I seriously doubt whether any clever patches on the model could ever bring it into agreement with the shaded area.Figure 7 shows a clear difference between evolutionists and creationist predictions, one of which a well-performed experiment could resolve decisively. Future theoretical and experimental results on Ar-to-He scaling could also shed more light. In the meantime we have every reason to be optomistic. We could summerize the He retention data as follows:-Over a billion years worth of nuclear decay occured within thousands of years ago!
-Accelerated nuclear decay appears to explain the above summary very well.Figure 7
Predictions of yet-future experiments on He diffusion through biotite, using the observed He retention in Jemez zircons in two very different theoretical models. An evolutionist model (gigayear timescale) predicts the line with square points. A creationist model (kiloyear timescale) predicts the line with round points. The solid line shows experimentally-measured Ar diffusion in biotite [Grove and Harrison, 1996], extrapolated down by the dashed line from high temperatures to these temperatures. Rough extrapolations from those data using He and Ar diffusion observed in other minerals [Carrol, 1991; Lippolt and Weigel, 1988] suggest that the He-in-biotite measurements will fall into the shaded band shown. Thus He diffusion measurements in biotite are likely to reject the evolutionist model and confirm the creationist model.7. Other Data Support the Helium Retention Data
[Snip]

"Thanks for helping out TC,Is that an online or CD-based version or did you type all that in by hand?"
--By hand, including the figures (yes they are accurate, give or take a pixel or two)."And what's the date on that edition? It mentions planned diffusion experiments that the ICR Impact 352 imply are already completed."
--We are approaching 2003 and the Radioisotopes & the age of the earth book is a 2000 publication. As the Impact-353 article hints on here:

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Two years ago it was reported that polonium (Po) radiohalos were still "a very tiny mystery."1 Since then, extensive research into the geological occurrence and distribution of Po, uranium (U) and thorium (Th) radiohalos has been undertaken as part of the RATE project,2 so now there are some preliminary results to report that are both significant and exciting.

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"I'd like to see that figure 6 that gives the 32 year old diffusion data from Magomedov. That is the only zircon diffusivity data mentioned anywhere in the several articles we have been discussing."
--Sure thing, here:
Figure 6. Helium diffuses very rapidly, within decades, out of bare zircons not embedded in biotite cyrstals Magomedov[/i], 1970. That suggests the surrounding biotite was the main restraint upon He diffusion out of the Jemez zircons.--Table 3 is also a reference in the above, so if it turns to be relevant:

Depth (km)	Temperature (oC)	Helium (cc/kg)	Retention (%)
0.95 ​ 1.17 ​ 2.90 ​ 3.50 ​ 3.93	105 ​ 151 ​ 197 ​ 239 ​ 277	86 ​ 36 ​ 28 ​ 0.72 ​ ~0.2	58 ​ 27 ​ 17 ​ 1.2 ​ ~0.1

"Since TB seems uninterested, maybe you'd like to go over the calculations with us, TC? All we need is the most up-to-date zircon diffusivity data that Humphreys is using. Or we can use the Reiners data that Humphreys claims to confirm his experiments.Are you willing, TC?"
--I can assess the problem, though I haven't fully been following the discussion as it pertains directly to He. Mind if you give a brief summery of the query & what progression has taken place?------------------

"And yet, we see on another thread that TC has written:"Catastrophic tectonics, flood surges, helium retention and a creationist cosmology IMO is the answer to your problems with YEC."
--Must've been another TC, whose the perpetrator?------------------