Earth science curriculum tailored to fit wavering fundamentalists

I guess you didn't hear that Wikipedia is in on the old earth conspiracy...

I'm on a tablet so urns urls are tricky so Google:Asa kbertsce coal

Awesome and thanks SO much.So appreciate everyone's assistance.JB

Thanks RAZD. An excellent article with perfect information for what I'm working on.JB

I'm thinking of a great visual aid to help get people past the Crocoduck nonsense. I've used it in conversation and it's quite helpful and it seem so obvious that I'm thinking someone surely has put something together to illustrate the concept.Imagine someone took a picture of a male human every year, from birth to 100 years old (or every month or day depending on your desired resolution). You put those 100 pictures in an ordered (or not) collage and tell the person to pick the exact picture where a boy becomes a man, or where middle age occurs, or where he became an old man. Of course the results will be predictably fuzzy.Everyone knows that given enough time, a boy becomes an old man. We also know that the 'transitional' results aren't a half boy / half old man - just as there is no crocoduck.Do you know if anyone has put something like this together visually? Finding a series of pictures from baby to adult shouldn't be too hard. Likely if I were to go to old age, it would take artist rendering rather than photos.Thoughts, suggestions? A better alternative?Thanks
JBEdited by ThinAirDesigns, : No reason given.

Another version of the same approach is a picture every generation (or ten generations) going back a few million years. One blends into the next in the exact same way.

I completely agree, and that's where I'm trying to lead them. Starting out, I'm trying to use conceptual demonstrations that involve time frames they will accept. The millions of years thing still makes them throw up in their mouths a little bit. JB

I agree that U and other radiation can create C-14 in-situ. But according to my calculations, the amounts are quite small. I have not been able to find data on the relative amounts of U in diamond deposits (maybe someone can find some data on this?). Below are my calculations for C-14 production in coal. I welcome any corrections to either my data or my calculations.1) simplifying assumption: we will assume that every neutron released ends up in an (n,p) reaction with an N-14 atom to produce C-14. This will somewhat overestimate the amount of C-14 produced. But it will be a reasonable approximation under the following conditions: 1) there is more than ~0.3% nitrogen in the coal, and 2) there is no more than ~6x as much hydrogen as nitrogen in the coal. {This is based on thermal neutron cross sections of about 5 mBarn for (n,gamma) on C-12, 300 mBarn for (n,gamma) on H-1, and 1.8 Barn for (n,p) on N-14. See http://www.iaea.org/...tionStore/_Public/28/060/28060364.pdf , The14N(n, p)14C reaction cross section for thermal neutrons | SpringerLink }2) approach: the system will eventually come to a steady state condition where the rate of C-14 creation is the same as the rate of C-14 decay. Under our simplifying assumption, this will happen when the rate of C-14 creation is the same as the rate of neutron emission. So we need to calculate the rate of neutron emission, equate it to the rate of C-14 decay, and see how much C-14 this corresponds to.3) U content: According to the USGS U.S. coal typically has about 1 ppm of uranium, and can rarely go as high as 20 ppm. In other parts of the world the content can occasionally be higher, up to 300 ppm or so . Let's assume for simplicity that the U content in coal is 1 ppm. Let's assume that the coal is nearly all carbon. Then for each coal atom, there is 1x10^-6 U atom.4) neutron production: The normal decay mode for U is alpha decay. The spontaneous fission rate is much lower . The half-life for spontaneous fission is 8.4x10^15 years. The mean life is this value divided by ln(2), or 1.2x10^16 years. Each spontaneous decay releases 2.07 neutrons on average. Thus, a U atom would be expected to emit a neutron every 5.9x10^15 years. So for our assumption of 1 ppm of U in coal, we expect 1.7x10^-22 neutrons to be released per year per atom of coal.

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5) C-14 content: In steady state, we will also have 1.7x10^-22 C-14 decays per year. Since the mean life of C-14 is 8267 years, we would then have 1.4x10^-18 C-14 atoms per atom of coal in steady state.

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The modern atmospheric ratio of C-14 to total C is about 1x10^-12. Thus, the steady state value for our assumptions is about 1.4x10^-4 percent modern carbon. If we assume 300 ppm U instead of 1 ppm U, we would get about 4x10^-2 percent (0.04%) modern carbon. This value is still pretty small; the RATE coal samples were 3x to 12x larger. So unless the RATE coal samples had 1000 to 4000 ppm of U, I can't see how in-situ production of C-14 from U accounts for their coal data.

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"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." — Albert Einstein

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I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schroedinger

bad argument. sorry.ABE:What if the coal were near a vein/deposit of uranium? Your calculations are using just the numbers for the uranium that might be contained in coal.Other than that, I don't find any issue with your calculations. I thought I saw some problems, but on closer review I decided your assumptions were not bad assuming that the U from the ppm of coal was the main culprit.But why cannot there be sources of U nearby which are on the order of 1 percent?Also there is boron-11 that emit neutrons after absorbing alpha particles. This could be a source of neutrons generated from U either within the coal or nearby. How common is boron in coal? Not sure, but I know that it is one of the elements that is found in coal ash that gets people upset. The issue here would be that the production of neutrons is tied to the alpha decay which is many times the rate of spontaneous fission.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Having worked with both uranium and coal deposits, I'm still kind of partial to this argument... I think that local conditions are important and probably cause the widely varying numbers for C14 in coal. In fact, there are more abundant radioisotopes than those of uranium. Thorium is about 3 times as abundant, IIRC. Not only that, but we should probably be dealing with daughter products more than the uranium itself. I think if we just look at the radon flux through coal beds for instance, we might come up with a very different viewpoint of what is happening. One of the biggest problems with coal is that it fixes a lot of mobile elements. In some uranium deposits a lump of carbonized wood can trap enough uranium to make it a very rich pod.

I did not mean that the irradiated coal argument was bad. I had written and then deleted some bad responses to the calculations that purported to show that irradiated coal idea would not work. The calculations are fine based on the assumptions made, but there are some issues with the assumptions.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I welcome any corrections that you can give to my argument! Your suggestion sounds reasonable to me, but I'm not a geologist. This supposition would be much more solid if someone could find some experimental, observational data to back it up. Anyone? Are you sure that you haven't mixed up these details? Do you have any references for the cross sections of an (alpha,n) reaction for B-11? I know that B-10 has a HUGE cross section (thousands of Barns) for the opposite reaction, (n, alpha). Natural boron is about 20% B-10 and 80% B-11. But the (n, alpha) cross section on B-10 is so large that natural boron is commonly used as a neutron absorber in nuclear reactor and particle accelerator development. (I knew a fellow building a small commercial proton accelerator who surrounded it with boxes of commercial borax to act as neutron absorbers.)I don't see how boron helps; any boron in the coal would tend to absorb neutrons and reduce the number available to make C-14 from N-14.

One thing that many of the fundamentalists have been taught over the years is binary thinking.. Every thing seems to be a dichotomy. True/false, Black/white, etc etc etc. One reason you might get a lot of resistance is they found out one thing was wrong from their religious belief, it might crumble their entire faith.It is a rare bird that leaves YEC, and keeps their faith.

Coal along with oil, gas and rocks with organic debris are reducing environments. U is mobile in oxidizing environments and precipitates out in reducing environments. Any ground water with U moving through an area will precipitate out the U if it crosses a reducing environment.This is how a Uranium roll front deposit works. The ground water containing a very small amount of U keeps moving until it hits an area which is a reducing environment and precipitates out. Over millions of years you end up getting a mineable Uranium deposit. There are hundreds if not thousands of these in the western USWhat all this means is that you cannot make the assumption the Uranium content of a coal has remained static since its formation since at any time ground/subsurface water containing U could have hit it and precipitate out addition U. This means a coal is totally worthless for dating. Seems to me RATE made a big deal out of a Cretaceous coal being much younger which doesn't surprise me since there are a lot of ash falls during the Tertiary which would add U to the system and would easily precipitate in the coals.I've seen this more times than I can count in subsurface borehole geophysical logs where coals can have about any gamma ray reading from very low to very highdepending on how much U has moved through the system.. In oil and gas deposits GR is used to determine the amount of clay in a rock, it being assumed it comes from K40 which you have in most clays. If the GR reading comes from U and Th it screws everything up. Then you run a Schlumberger NGT log, (natural Gamma Ray spectroscopy) to see how much of your GR reading is from K40 vs U&Th.Hope that helps.Edited by petrophysics1, : No reason given.

Holy crap I learn so much cool stuff from you folk.THANKSJB