Personally I find that many new creationists come in here wanting to talk about many different issue and get distracted by going off in many directions.
I'd advise you to narrow your focus and deal with specific items one at a time.
Again, there is evidence that a huge extinction event occurred which wiped out 95% of all marine life and at least 70% of land life.
Don't you find it curious that, if this were due to a flood, that more marine life was killed than terrestrial life? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
I get that with carbon dating it's dating the half-lives of carbon, and with dendrochronology is comparing tree rings to determine age. However, I also see noticeable assumptions made in both cases. You're assuming the decay rate of half lives is the same. Why? And you're assuming the rate of tree ring growth is constant. Why?
Simply put, the matter is one of correlations. See Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 for a fuller explanation. In a nutshell, there are three different dendrochronologies, from three different areas of the globe, that agree with each other with an error of 0.5%. These chronologies correlate with other chronologies, like the Lake Suigetsu varves in Japan, which is made from annual deposits.
These annual age counting systems also correlate with levels of 14C in the organic samples of the tree rings and debris in the lake varves, such that when plotted against the counted ages they form an exponential curve that happens to match the curve for 14C based on its half-life.
Exponential curves look like this:
This is a rather extraordinary correlation, given that the layers are linear incremental integers, and the 14C data is an exponential curve.
Anyone trying to claim that these dates are wrong needs to explain this extraordinary correlation.
And that is only the beginning of the data that supports an old earth.
If there are worldwide catastrophes wreaking havoc on the environment, is it possible they could affect atmospheric levels of carbon?
Yes, the release of archaic methane (CH4) from the continental shelf boundary could alter the proportion of 14C to 12C in the atmosphere, as all the 14C in those gases would have decayed already (of course this also means that the deposits are over ~75,000 years old minimum to have unmeasurable levels of 14C).
This would result in a significant jog in the data shown on this graph:
Fig. 1. (A) Radiocarbon calibration up to 45,000 yr B.P. reconstructed from annually laminated sediments of Lake Suigetsu, Japan. The small circles with 1s error represent the 14C ages against varve ages. For the oldest eight points (>38,000 years, filled circles), we assumed a constant sedimentation during the Glacial period. The green symbols correspond to the tree-ring calibration (2, 15), and the large red symbols represent calibration by combined 14C and U-Th dating of corals from Papua New Guinea (squares) (8), Mururoa (circles), and Barbados (triangles) (7). The line indicates that radiocarbon age equals calibrated age.
No such jog exists within the time frame shown, so it appears that no such event occurred within the last 45,000 years. If you are going to propose one, then you need to explain how this fails to show up in the Lake Suigetsu data, or posit that it occurred before 45,000 years ago (in which case there would be no effect on any 14C dates).
Or even affect the decay rate itself?
Amusingly, we know of no process at this time that significantly affects the radioactive rate of decay. If you want to discuss this further, there is a thread, Are Uranium Halos the best evidence of (a) an old earth AND (b) constant physics? that demonstrates some basic problems confronting any claim for changing decay rates. In a nutshell, these halos take hundreds of millions of years to form based on physics as we know it, and that if the decay rate changed, this would have affected the way these objects form, changing the radius of the different isotopes, and this would result in visible differences compared to what is seen.
Furthermore, we know the erosive effects of water and lava. If you have a global flood with volcanic activity, what effect might that have on decay rate of matter and carbon 14?
Organic matter maybe, none whatsoever on 14C and any other radioactive material. This is radioactive decay, not to be confused with microbial decay or erosion etc.
One of my pet peeves is the misuse of terms, especially scientific terms used in a specific manner in science. Thus I find it necessary to make sure we are talking about the same thing.
It might also delve into the question of whether there is evidence for microevolution as opposed to macroevolution, ...
I understand where you want to go with this, but I think you are being a bit premature to introduce this before the possibility of a flood has been validated, and it doesn't really relate to this topic but to the feasibility of an building an ark.
And before we even get there we need to have an understanding of what is meant by microevolution and macroevolution.
I'm not sure what the longest is. Presumably a number of early humans have been sequenced, in part at least, as they have sequenced Neanderthal fossils going back 30,000 years and more.
IIRC some cro-magnon sequences were run similar to the neanders, and from about the same time.
It would be interesting to see how they nest with Mediterranean DNA. I would think the probability is high that they would, so they might not provide the same argument as your Pacfic NW.
What about those south american fossils that are pushing the time frame for people in the americas?
Mass Extinctions ... and the problem with Mass Extinctions
Hi Jzyehoshua, you have a lot to respond to ...
... so I'm going to add a little bit more.
I would like to see a topic created discussing the possible evidence for a global flood.
One piece of possible evidence for a global flood would be mass extinctions, especially one where there were more extinctions of land organisms than of marine organisms.
The problem with mass extinctions are (a) there are so many, that if this is evidence of a global flood, then there must have been multiple floods (or other catastrophes), and (2) there has been no mass extinction since apes evolved.
The last mass extinction was at the end of the Cretaceous period, the KT boundary, some 65 million years ago.
Meanwhile, apes evolved from earlier primates some ~30 to 25 million years ago:
• Hominoidea - all of the above, plus gibbons (Hylobatoidae).
The chart (at right) shows the evolutionary chronology inputed to these biological branches.
With Homo sapiens only showing up some 200,000 years ago.
This means that no apes of any kind have experienced a mass extinction.
One of the other problems you have, is that it is possible to find bits and pieces of evidence that can support virtually any hypothesis, such as (for instance) that the earth is flat.
However, for an hypothesis to be valid, not only must there be evidence that supports it, but there can be no evidence that contradicts it.
Evidence of an oblate spheroid shaped earth orbiting the sun invalidates the flat earth (and the geocentric earth) hypothesis.
Evidence that the earth is old invalidates the young earth hypothesis.
To be scientifically valid, the hypothesis must not only address all the known evidence, but predict new evidence that has yet to be found, evidence that would not exist unless the hypothesis is true, and thus gives falsification tests for the hypothesis.
THUS:
IF there were only one global world wide flood, and no other world wide catastrophes of any kind, THEN there would be only one mass extinction event in the fossil record.
This is falsified by the evidence of multiple extinction events.
AND:
IF there were a global flood that is recorded by humans, THEN there would be evidence of a mass extinction event while humans were living.
This is falsified by the absence of mass extinctions after 25 million years ago, to say nothing of in the last 200,000 years.
A negative statement can be proven. If I asked you to prove that a cat does not go "woof" every time you hit it - it would only require 1 cat and a stick to prove that negative statement true.
That only proves that this one cat did not go "woof" - not that there isn't A cat that would, so no you don't have a proof.
Amusingly, there's also this to consider:
Watch the mouth when the cat turns around.
This of course could be faked, but how could you know?
A negative statement can be proven.
Some very specific negative statements can be proven, general broad statements are much more difficult:
"There is no milk in this bowl at the time I am looking at today" VS "there is no milk in any bowl"
As the second is false it would be very difficult to prove true.
It would be better to show that this specific negative could be proven than to just make critical statements.
Sorry to interfere, but I’ve never understood creationist arguments on the so-called polystrate fossils. Maybe Just Being Real could enlighten me on this.
Message 189: I also think that they are the only people who claim that "geologists say that these sediments were deposited over millions of years".
I am a geologist and I don't.
Nice to see another geologist on the forum.
In essence what they are doing is (a) finding fossils that extend through several layers of deposition, and (b) claiming that each layer was formed "over millions of years" thus creating an apparent paradox for the preservation of the fossil.
The problem is that (b) hasn't been shown to apply to the cases that involve (a), AND there are other explanations for preserved fossils extending through many layers of sediment.
A fossil specimen can be buried by soft materials\sediments during the fossilization process, and this softer material can subsequently be eroded away before the next layer of sediment is deposited -- creationists often ignore (or are ignorant of) erosion as part of the process. There are preserved trees in Michigan that are covered by sand dunes and periodically uncovered and recovered. They are still standing upright. Ghost Forest, Sleeping Bear Point | Michigan in Pictures Several layers of sediment have and can continue to form around these trees, and if buried by subsequent processes, this can lead to the formation of polystrate fossils in these cases.
Alternatively, a fossil specimen can be deposited on the bottom of an anaerobic pond or streambed and become mummified before it is fossilized, this then keeps the specimen intact as various layers of fine sediment are deposited in several layers around it. The fossils of fish in the green river varves show the characteristics of fossilized mummies with subsequent sedimentary deposits around them.
Hi Just being real, just a single point at a time eh?
No actually I was referring to something much simpler. The carbon 14 testing of things that should not possess any carbon 14 (like coal), and finding very significant amounts. Which make it impossible for them to be more than 50 k years old.
You need to provide your sources again. I think you will find that the levels are just above the measurable threshold, which is not a "very significant amount" IMHO (of course this being a subjective statement it could be to you -- more likely the author of the site you got this from used those words to impress you).
Cosmic rays enter the earth's atmosphere in large numbers every day. For example, every person is hit by about half a million cosmic rays every hour. It is not uncommon for a cosmic ray to collide with an atom in the atmosphere, creating a secondary cosmic ray in the form of an energetic neutron, and for these energetic neutrons to collide with nitrogen atoms. When the neutron collides, a nitrogen-14 (seven protons, seven neutrons) atom turns into a carbon-14 atom (six protons, eight neutrons) and a hydrogen atom (one proton, zero neutrons). Carbon-14 is radioactive, with a half-life of about 5,700 years.
Carbon-14 in Living Things
The carbon-14 atoms that cosmic rays create combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which plants absorb naturally and incorporate into plant fibers by photosynthesis. Animals and people eat plants and take in carbon-14 as well. The ratio of normal carbon (carbon-12) to carbon-14 in the air and in all living things at any given time is nearly constant. Maybe one in a trillion carbon atoms are carbon-14. The carbon-14 atoms are always decaying, but they are being replaced by new carbon-14 atoms at a constant rate. At this moment, your body has a certain percentage of carbon-14 atoms in it, and all living plants and animals have the same percentage.
As soon as a living organism dies, it stops taking in new carbon. The ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 at the moment of death is the same as every other living thing, but the carbon-14 decays and is not replaced. The carbon-14 decays with its half-life of 5,700 years, while the amount of carbon-12 remains constant in the sample. By looking at the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in the sample and comparing it to the ratio in a living organism, it is possible to determine the age of a formerly living thing fairly precisely.
(see article for formula and sample calculation)
Because the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years, it is only reliable for dating objects up to about 60,000 years old.
(see article for more information if you are interested)
So the limit of detecting carbon-14 consumed by plants and animals that originally came from the atmosphere has a practical limit of 50 to 60 thousand years.
This is not the only source of carbon-14 however.
Carbon-14 is also found the graphite (carbon) rods used to control nuclear reactors, and can be formed from carbon-13 in natural nuclear reactions where they are near deposits of uranium.
There is a HIGH correlation of coal containing carbon-14 with deposits of uranium, while other deposits of coal with NO uranium do not have any measurable levels of carbon-14 -- meaning they must be older than 50-60k years and contradict the YEC earth age concepts.
Now if you want to discuss the validity of carbon-14 dating, that is off topic here, but there are several sites in this forum where you can go, read the current information there, and then provide your opinions:
Specifically, when it comes to oil, scientists are looking for sources that are free from carbon-14 contamination in order to make scintillation basins to test for particles IIRC, and have found several sources with carbon-14 levels at the low end of detectability. These sources are also associated with uranium deposits and the radioactivity can "contaminate" the oil in several ways to produce detectable carbon-14.
quote:Claim CD011.6: Coal and oil are supposedly millions of years old. Effectively all of the carbon-14 in a sample would have decayed in that time. But carbon-14 still exists in coal, implying an age of only about 50,000 years.
Minute amounts of contamination from these sources can cause apparent ages around 50,000 years, which is near the limit of the maximum age that carbon dating can measure.
Note (1) that 50,000 years is already older than any YEC concept of the age of the earth and (2) there are other deposits without detectable levels of carbon-14, and thus, even IF there are SOME young deposits of coal and oil, the evidence shows there are others which are even older than the dating limits.
I still can't see where any real scientist even tried to do C-14 age determinations on either coal seams or oil deposits.
I don't see where there would be any point to do the age calculation, as other dating methods show the coal deposits to be older than the limits of C-14. Rather they would be interested in finding the causes for the anomalous readings. The correlations of anomalous readings with uranium deposits or surface contamination or with instrument calibrations, for instance.
They measure the C-14, not the age.
Agreed. And before an age is calculated in normal usage, one would also need to know if there were any reservoir affect involved, then the age is adjusted by the calibration curves (see 14C Calibration and Correlations message 1 - these corrections make the actual ages even older than the C14 ages).
Real scientists try to find deposits free of C-14 contamination in oil, but they seem very difficult to find. It does happen, though. How do the YEC's explain them, or do they just ignore it?
I am not aware of any YECist discussing the C14 free oils.
I don't see anything about coal deposits in there.
Some of my old bookmarks no longer work, so I did a little digging and found the TalkOrigins article by Kathleen Hunt that I originally was looking for:
quote:Dr. Gove wrote back the very next day, as did one of his colleagues. By sheer coincidence, they are currently studying this exact question. It turns out that the origin and concentration of 14C in fossil fuels is important to the physics community because of its relevance for detection of solar neutrinos. Apparently one of the new neutrino detectors, the Borexino detector in Italy, works by detecting tiny flashes of visible light produced by neutrinos passing through a huge subterranean vat of "scintillation fluid". Scintillation fluid is made from fossil fuels such as methane or oil (plus some other ingredients), and it sparkles when struck by beta particles or certain other events such as neutrinos. The Borexino detector has 800 tons of scintillant. However, if there are any native beta emitters in the fluid itself, that natural radioactive decay will also produce scintillant flashes. (In fact that's the more common use of scintillant. I use scintillant every day in my own work to detect 14C and 3H-tagged hormones. But I only use a milliliter at a time - the concept of 800 tons really boggles the mind!). So, the physics community has gotten interested in finding out whether and why fossil fuels have native radioactivity. ... ... In the course of this work, they've discovered that fossil fuels vary widely in 14C content. Some have no detectable 14C; some have quite a lot of 14C. Apparently it correlates best with the content of the natural radioactivity of the rocks surrounding the fossil fuels, particularly the neutron- and alpha-particle-emitting isotopes of the uranium-thorium series. Dr. Gove and his colleagues told me they think the evidence so far demonstrates that 14C in coal and other fossil fuels is derived entirely from new production of 14C by local radioactive decay of the uranium-thorium series. Many studies verify that coals vary widely in uranium-thorium content, and that this can result in inflated content of certain isotopes relevant to radiometric dating (see abstracts below). I now understand why fossil fuels are not routinely used in radiometric dating!
Dr. Gove and his colleagues are currently trying to improve AMS technology to be able to identify certain fossil fuels that have extremely low 14C content. Current AMS techniques have a 14C/C detection limit of about 10^-15 (corresponding to 60,000 yrs), and Dr. Gove's current research, this year, is aimed at improving detectability to 10^-18 (110,000 yrs). ...
And I'll bet they will find coal with levels that would indicate an age of 110,000 years when they do.
Which btw brings me to another point. If you want to have a contest between creationist blunders and evolutionist blunders, there are just as many stones to throw in each camp. Obviously this would be a pointless endeavour.
Actually it gets quite humorous to compare these 'blunders' and the hoaxes of creationists to those of science, especially to compare them with current knowledge and who provided it.
No hoax yet has ever been uncovered by a creationist, they were all uncovered by science
Science discards invalid information.
Creationism holds on to, and repeats, invalid information.
For instance creationists keep bringing up Piltdown man as if it were some icon necessary to science -- it isn't, it is discarded as a hoax and has no effect on modern science. The perpetuation of talk about Piltdown by creationists is dishonest.
Then you need to point to specific formations that these pulses created and show how they produced alternating layers of fine grained sediments and diatoms as well as sorting organic debris by tiny differences in 14C. Until you do so, you have no argument.
There are three long continuous (unbroken from today) dendrochronologies (and a lot of short ones) and one (of many) "floating" ones (where they are not directly connected to today), and they are:
quote:
The Irish Oaks, extending continuously back over 7,000 years before the present day (2010).
The bristlecone pines, including two trees that are over 4,000 years old in continous growth to the day measured, and overall to an age of ~9,000 years before the present day (2010).
The Geman Oaks, extending back continuously over 9,197 years before the present day (2010).
# The German & Swiss Pines, a floating dendrochronology, that is cross-linked to the oak chronology to extend the combined unbroken chronology to over 12,460 years before the present day (2010).
The last one is cross-linked with the other three, and correlates climate and 14C contents. It is not logically possible for the tree rings to have the same age and different 14C contents, because trees normally get their 14C from the atmosphere. The 14C measurements and tree ring age were made to develop a calibration curve to improve the accuracy of 14C dating:
quote:
Note that the curve has almost continuous small jagged variations around a smooth curve.
The production of 14C is related to cosmic ray emmisions from the sun:
The solar cycle varies on a 28 year period, and this accounts for the small jagged teeth in the calibration curve: this is another correlation between the tree ring data and 14C, in addition to the correlation between all the sources of tree rings and the 14C content in the various rings.
and
(2) Lake Suigetsu Varves and 14C
quote:This is a single chronology formed by alternating biological deposition (diatoms in summer) and sediment deposition (clay in winter). The clay is being deposited all year, but settles slower than the diatoms, so in the summer (when a lot of diatoms grow and die) there are more diatom shells than clay, while in the winter (when diatom growth is halted) there is more clay deposited than diatoms.
Here's the combined calibration curve:
Where the green line is the calibration curve from the tree rings shown previously, and the blue circles are the data from the lake varve samples (from organic matter deposited in the layers).
But that's not all, there is also this correlation between the layers and 14C AND the rate of deposition:
This graph shows the varve and 14C chronologies as a function of depth. As shown, the sedimentation or annual varve thickness is relatively uniform (typically 1.2 mm yr-1 during the Holocene and 0.62 mm yr-1 during the Glacial). At the end of the glacial period the rate of deposition changed, as would be expected when less water is tied up in ice and the climate warms.
When you realize that one is a linear system of varve counting and the other is a mathematical model based on actual measurements that are along an exponential distribution: ...
There is no rational reason for the 14C curve to make the same change in slope at the same time as the varve age curve, unless it measures the same thing that the varve counting does - age.
I would like to see Robert Beyers (or any other creationist) explain how a flood can
create hyper growth with multiple tree rings yet with different levels of 14C in them along an exponential curve that matches the tree ring count age, and
keep each group of tree samples in separate distinct areas on the surface of the earth, and
cause alternating diatom/clay layers to form, complete with undisturbed remnants of leaves and twigs typical of annual deposition AND with different levels of 14C in them along an exponential curve that matches the varve count age, and
cause clay settle rapidly, and
account for the change in rate of deposit of the layers from one uniform rate to another at one point along the way.
You will notice that the title of this thread is "Potential Evidence for a Global Flood". The title is not "Imaginations on the Global Flood". You need to supply evidence to support your ideas.
One should also note that these chronologies are continuous to the present times, and they show processes that we see today in uninterrupted progression into the past, which would NOT be the case if there were a world wide flood in those times.
Does one throw out the Young Earth concept in order to keep a WWF concept? This data is not compatible with both these concepts.
Enjoy.
{The bulk of this message now hidden as being off-topic. - Adminnemooseus}
Edited by RAZD, : spling
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Hide much, do off-topic banner, add note.
Re: more than just layers, layers with different fossil species
Hi Pressie,
Yes, Coccoliths show speciation in the fossil record. This is a good example Just a moment...
It shows evolution, extinction of some species, etc.
Sorry, this is off-topic and I should not have answered.
No, it is not off-topic -- it is evidence that these deposits did not occur during a flood.
Floods don't arrange things in neat sorted piles.
Additionally, fossil layers of marine growth show long term growth, longer than is possible given the purported duration of the flood.
Brachipods have growth rings typically showing ages of 20 to 30 years in a layer, and are attached to the sea floor with stalks. They are fossilized [i]in situ[/u] by silt build up that leaves their ecology undisturbed, and builds up another similar layer as the previous growth is gradually buried. The ages of continuous marine growth can be hundreds of years long - and thus could not be due to a flood.
When we go around the world and look at all the fossil beds that creationists like Robert Byers claim to be evidence of floods, we see similar fossils of long term mature marine growth that is completely inconsistent with a flood model.
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