Age Correlations and an Old Earth: Version 1 No 3 (formerly Part III)

I've been wanting to post in this topic for a while, and finally just decided to go ahead and do so. Part of my dissertation (just finished!) included a calculation of meteorite fall rates and a determination of the amount and types of material that fall to the Earth per year. While I'm not an expert on this subject, the research material is intriguing. I find it somewhat amusing when the meteorite dust is used for a young earth when it's been shown very clearly that meteorite dust fall rates correlate very well with an old Earth, and, in fact, make a young Earth / Noah's flood geology impossible.At present, we receive ~3 x 10⁷ kg of meteoritic dust over the surface of the Earth per year (Love and Brownlee, 1993), and is a bit better constrained than the Dohnanyi calculation. This value is known from sky observations, deep ocean cores, ice cores, and a number of other methods, so it's pretty well established. Meteoritic dust is substantially enriched in the element iridium by about a factor of 100 over the crustal abundance (Lodders and Fegley 1998), which is what allowed Alvarez to propose a meteorite impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.Kyte and Wasson (1984) analyzed a series of deep sea sediment cores dated from the past 50 million years and calculated the fraction of extraterrestrial material from the concentration of iridium in this dust. Knowing the rates of deposition for this material, they then determined the fall rates necessary to provide this extraterrestrial iridium. And lo and behold, the extraterrestrial material fall rates calculated by Kyte and Wasson (1984) closely matched the Love and Brownlee (1993) rates.This means that the present day meteorite flux rates and the flux rates for the last 50 million years or so have not changed significantly. The meteorite fall rate for old rocks correlates with what we see now, which is a strong correlation for an old Earth.
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Conversely, we could calculate what might happen if we had to fit 4.5 billion years of geology in one year, as Flood geology would require. Since the iridium concentration is fairly constant throughout the whole of the deep sea cores examined, a flood geologist would have to assume that during the flood, the fall rate meteorites would have to be equivalent to fitting 4.5 billion times the present day meteorite flux into one year. So:3 x 10⁷ kg x 4.5 x 10⁹ years worth of meteorite flux
=1.35 x 10¹⁷ kg of meteoritic material fell during the flood year.The energy imparted by this amount of material is equal to:
1/2 M V², where M is the mass of the extraterrestrial material, and V is the velocity at which it falls to the Earth (equal to the escape velocity, or 11200 m/s). This gives:
1/2 (1.35 x 10¹⁷ kg) * (11200 m/s)²
= 8.5 x 10²⁴ Joules.So the Earth's atmosphere would have had to accomodate 8 x 10²⁴ J of energy from this falling meteorite matter. We can do a quick calculation to determine the amount of heating this would cause:Energy = M_atmo * Cp *(T), where M_atmo is the mass of the atmosphere (5 x 10¹⁸ kg), Cp is the pressure constant for air (about 716 J/kg * K for N2), and T is the temperature change of the atmosphere. Solve for T:
T = Energy/ (M_atmo * Cp)
= 8 x 10²⁴ J / ((5 x 10¹⁸ kg) *716 J /kg * K)
= 2,400 K.So the temperature change of the Earth's atmosphere would be about a 2,400 K increase. Pretty toasty for that poor boat! This even gets worse when we have to consider the late heavy bombardment!Refs:
Kyte, F.T. and Wasson, J.T., 1986, Accretion rate of extraterrestrial material: iridium deposited 33 to 67 million years ago. Science 232, 1225-1229.Lodders, K. and Fegley, B., 1998, The Planetary Scientist’s Handbook. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 371 pp.Love, S.G. and Brownlee, D.E., 1993, A direct measurement of the terrestrial massaccretion rate of cosmic dust. Science 262, 550-553.

Snork! It makes me giggle.I like that a lot, Matt. That must have been a toasty Flood.

OT but of some side relevance:Not to mention the heat from all the continents skittering around the planet. Or 4.5 GA worth of radio active elements decaying in the course of a year.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Hey MattP, thanks for the {corroboration\correction} on the rate of dust accumulation. I had noticed a comment about iridium in the TO article and was intrigued by the implications for tracking the dust in other locations.Specifically I am wondering if the amount of iridium can be used to show the rate of accumulation of space dust in the greenland and antarctic ice cores and use this to provide another correlation that the layers represent years (ie - independent of the other measures they've used).As for the heat calculations, most people won't make hide nor tail out of them - NPR had a program on hurricanes and concepts people had for stopping them. They commonly failed to grasp the scale of the hurricanes in their proposals. One proposed dropping plane loads of water absorbing diaper gels on the storm. Another proposed blowing the storm up with a nuclear bomb.I shiver at the thought of our dearly deluded president getting that idea, for what would happen is not a dispersal of the storm but a turbo charging of it -- all that heat and energy added to it while the 'wind' created would hardly amount to a serious gust for the storm. The storm would get bigger and badder AND be radioactive. Sounds like the kind of "solution" the botch administration would embrace.I mention this, though, as a caution on your heat calculations -- this material, raining down (heh) like that would also make the storms more violent.Enjoy.

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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
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Heh. Probably with about the same effect on a growing hurricane as a sardine farting. What does a plain-vanilla Oklahoma thunderstorm yield in energy? Twenty kilotons, just like Hiroshima was?

Indeed- that's the consequence of trying to fit 4.5 billion years in 1 year. What's really funny is that even minor effects, like meteorites falling to the Earth, quickly balloon to water-boiling effects. I'd hate to have to cram tectonism, volcanism, and the Lunar impact record in that one year (or rather, would love to do those calcs, just to demonstrate their complete implausibility).

Hey RAZD, indeed, I found an Italian group doing just that. Here's the (badly translated) webpage:
Pagina non trovata | Consiglio Nazionale delle RicercheIt looks like they've got a pretty decent correlation to the understood fluxes, within a factor of 2. So it could potentially be used to correlate with other dating techniques. I smell a good dissertation project for a grad student!As to your other comments, I agree with you that most people won't give a darn for these calculations. Oh well, they're fun.

for MurkyWatersdiscussion re age of the earth only.

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Simply wanted to point out that none of these various "correlations" are a test of time.In other words. You can go through each and every test (core samples, to radiometric sampling) and it's not time that you are testing.Thanks RAZD for the link to this thread. Yet another thread for me to try and keep track of!

Hughes writes: In any words, what are you talking about?If a given time in the past is the answer to given decay equations, or counting rings or layers, what else would one be testing for?If the ages correlate from so many different methods, does that not show that time was not magically expanded or contracted in the past? If that's what you mean, for one guess.Actually, I don't understand what you mean, do you? Please elaborate.

I think he has the idea that time is a concrete substance, like dirt is, and not just an abstraction.

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Then please do so.Let's start with the tree rings: tell me how counting annual tree rings does not measure the ages of the trees and establish a test of ages.Show how the samples used are false within the known time-frames of history. We can keep it simple -- just stick to the facts and present the evidence to back your assertions. Don't drag in extraneous concepts.Without substantiating your assertion, I will take this as just your blanket denial of reality.So: tree rings ... show me how they are not a "test of time" -- your move.Enjoy.{abe}Please try to differentiate your argument between what ID shows and what your christian beliefs involve.{/abe}Edited by RAZD, : added end

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First, what is time, that you claim to be testing it?Is it an abstraction? Can abstractions be tested? Is this an extraneous concept? We are talking about testing time right? Why else would we be talking about tree rings?I think that the tree rings are probably one of the better tests. Though it's not a strict test of time, but of tree growth.If the creation model (any of them) is accurate, then the assumption that all trees started as seeds is in error. Meaning that the core sample, could contain years that were placed their by the creator, at the beginning.In other words, the idea, that everything started from seeds is not a testable proposition. Therefore, even though tree rings are probably the best test of the passage of time, it still involves assumptions that have no verification.Contamination of the sample is also an issue. Could be more rings in a year, or less. That's why it's not a test of time.

do you not understand the concept of testing the passing of time?start at 0. at point 60, you know that an hour has passed (if using minutes).Throuhgout the day, twenty four hours pass. time has gone by. But how do we know this? well, we can look at the sun. in the morning it was in the east, it went down on the west. we can look at the moon. (i think it follows the same pattern as the sun, but as I never really pay attention to it). or better yet, you can look at how the moon changes. And realize from one night to the other, that, hey, it's different. we can look at your age. Do you dispute that x many years have passed since you were born? Do you dispute that the Roman empire was around 2000 years ago?That's what all this stuff tests--the passage of time, how much time has gone by from point x to point y.and if you dispute the passage of time, well, . . .

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Was just curious why paleomagnetism was not included with your age correlations as magnetic reversals and magnetic orientation are usually correlated to Ar/Ar and Kr/Ar radioisotope dates. Granted it is considerably less discrete then radioisotope methods but it is often used as supporting evidence when dating formations in the literature.Apparently such data goes back to the late Ordovician, with some gaps, which would mean a minimum Earth age of 450 mya.Here is an online textbook chapter for anyone interested:http://www.geo.arizona.edu/Paleomag/book/chap09.pdfAnd the whole book, for background:http://www.geo.arizona.edu/Paleomag/book/