Age Correlations and an Old Earth

Name a few of those factors, whatever. In the context of Lake Suigetsu, please, where the varves are a clayey layer from the winter/spring rains and a diatom layer from the summer growth of diatoms. How many summers did they have each year when Walt brown was a boy, and Noah was floating around? And WHY DO THE 14C DATES MATCH UP WITH THE VARVE COUNT????

And another problem or two for you to address, whatever:*the varves, as you've been told, consist of a dark clay layer along with a light diatom-shell layer. How does stirred-up shallow sediment form 45,000+ pairs of layers like that, when modern-day sediment is clay in the winter/spring and diatoms in the summer?*The 14C used for dating, as you've been told, is from leaves, insect parts, and the like. It's not in a water-soluble form, or it wouldn't be there.* The cores were from out in the middle of the lake.*Answer Percy and Ned. Why the correlation?

Whatever, educate yourself just a tiny bit, please.Go to Google - it's a search engine on the internet - and type in "varve" and "sediment trap". Read over some of the hundred or so hits you get. The study you seek has been done. Repeatedly. May I reply, "DUH!!" ? They're in the middle of the friggin' lake, undisturbed by erosion! That's why they're varves and not delta deposits or sandbars! Can we change your nick from "whatever" to "osmium," are are you just jacking us around?[This message has been edited by Coragyps, 04-11-2004]

I would be astonished by a change of 5%. There are just too many precise, independent radioisotope dates on too many meteorites.

Rickrose:
The Lake Suigetsu calibration was done by comparing two sets of "absolute" numbers. One set, as you say, was the actual count of dark/light pairs in the core they drilled - say, your layer number 24,300. The other set of numbers was actual calculated figures from the amount of carbon-14 left in leaves, insect parts, etc. picked from a numbered layer and from the known (5730 year) half life of C-14. The numbers were expected to disagree somewhat, because we already knew that the formation rate of C-14 hasn't been constant. (That's actually the whole point of the paper - to calibrate that inconstant supply to something - the varves - that are more "countable.")Now there are possible errors in either set of numbers. The cores could have lost some varves when they were drilled, and there could have perhaps been years where layers didn't get laid down. The 14C numbers have some inherent measurement error and the possibility of some contamination. But if you look at the graph.....
The 14C dates uniformly get older as you go deeper. The layer count gets older as you go deeper. There's very little scatter in the numbers.And then add to this one lake the correlation of the "wiggles" in the curve with wiggles from tree rings in Finland and in Germany, ice layers in Greenland, Bolivia, Chile, Kenya, and Antarctica, corals in Barbados, varves on the seafloor off Venezuela...
it starts to add up.Bristlecone pine chronology only goes back about 8000 years, IIRC. Google "dendrochronology" and look for Grissino-Meyers' site and you can eventually find enough dates to choke a tortoise.[This message has been edited by Coragyps, 04-28-2004]

Thanks for that clarification, Ned. I don't have the Lake Suigetsu paper in front of me, but as I remember the agreement of varve with 14C is maybe 10% at the very worst - a time of particularly anomalous 14C production in the atmosphere - and usually more like 3% or so.

Rick, you can read the paper with the link in the first post of thie thread.
This particular study started at ~10 meters deep, or ~8000 years ago, as tree ring and glacier varves had already done the calibration back to that point. The authors mention that varves measure "typically 1.2 mm/year during the Holocene" which is the last 10,000 years or so. There's a footnote to another article where I presume this part is reported on more fully, but I'm 85 miles from a real academic library....

Apparently. But the upper core data may well be published elsewhere, like maybe a paper by Kitagawa footnoted in the Science paper. Regardless, the German and Finnish tree-ring records are continuous to 10 to 11,000 years back - the Holocene is pretty well covered. A good, readable book from one of the heavy hitters in the field. You'll enjoy it. I think I have some references when you are ready.

Many were deposited under water. Fresh water can replace salt water in aquifers without them collapsing at all: some oil reservoirs in Wyoming have continuous fresh water supply from snowmelt on mountains many miles away. As long as human activity doesn't withdraw fluid so fast thar unconsolidated aquifers compact, they won't collapse anyway.Oh, correlations! How 'bout those pesky correlations people keep mentioning? Are you going to address the topic of this thread, whatever?This message has been edited by Coragyps, 07-06-2004 10:27 PM

Glaciers.
Rivers of ice.
Hidden at the bottom of a world-wide body of water that's laying down sediments.
Not floating, though.
Digging kettle lakes, instead, as soon as the Flud asswages.
Yeah.
Quit smoking that stuff, whatever.

This might make a fun new thread sometime: what documentation is there for this tremendous increase in earthquake frequency that fundies go on about? How much of the "increase" d'ya think might have to do with the invention and continuing improvement of the seismometer? Hmmm? More of Walt's bullshit......
Where was the heat sink to remove all that heat of fusion of all this fountain water that turned to ice? Or the heat sink to cool it from 700 F to 32 so it could start to freeze? Did angels carry off the heat, or did the vacuum of the exosphere do it?

And WT, please note that all those hundreds of rocks in Percy's table ( well, Dalrymple's table ) do not result from the evil biases of all those evil scientists that had their God-Sense removed by studying geology. All those dates result from measuring amounts of certain isotopes in rocks and then plugging the amounts into equations. Measurement. Calculation. Reporting of answer. The End.They didn't go wagging off to West Greenland and the Moon collecting rocks just to confound you fundies. Really, that likely never occurred to any of them.