Potassium Argon Dating doesnt work at all

But it's immaterial to dating when the elements were formed - only when they first froze out in rocks is of any consequence in dating.

And exactly that technology is being used to date, for instance, how long the rocks around the Grand Canyon have been on the surface. 36Cl and 3He, at least, build up in near-surface (to a meter or two down) rock in a readily-modelled manner. Look up "cosmogenic isotopes."

I think I'd have to call that an urban legend, too, in the absence of a cite: 40K decays by beta particles, which are pretty wimpy radiation...

Hi, Kyle! I've seen you around some board or the other in the past, but, as they say, the memory is the second thing to go. The word to watch out for there is "can." That is very likely true - strata can form quickly. But examples of them doing so are pretty rare - that's part of why sedimentologists and stratigraphers go to school for all those years, and go study the rocks in place all the time. You just plain can't get sediments like those in the Delaware Basin of Texas to form quickly, with submillimeter-thick alternating layers stacked up two kilometers thick. And you can't grow a 500 meter thick coral reef in just a millenium or two. And there are still the various radioisotope dating methods that can often be used to check on stratigraphy, and these are independent of both the stratigraphy and of each other.
So yes, Berthault might be right about what can happen, but that doesn't translate into what does happen 99.5% of the time.

Let us start with
Kitigawa and van der Plicht, Science, 279, pp 1187-1190, (1998), which correlates 250 14C dates with their corresponding annual varves in Lake Suigetsu, Japan. (free read with registration at Science | AAAS )Reichow, et al, ibid., 296, pp 1846-1849, (2002) with about 25 Ar-Ar dates on basalts from the Siberian Traps and their underground eastward extensions - some of these dates are indeed "off" by as much as two million years, but that's out of 250 million. (maybe not free online till its one-year anniversary?)and
Genty, et al., Nature 421. pp 833-837, (2003) with a twenty-page supplement of U-Th dates on stalagmites back to 83,000 years ago, each date ordered in the same sequence in which its rock sample occurred in the stalagmite. (abstract free at Nature , but the paper means a trip to the college library)[This message has been edited by Coragyps, 05-25-2003]