RATE group reveals exciting breakthroughs!
Cooperation (and quality control) brings results
by Carl Wieland, CMI–Australia
21 August 2003
A few years ago an initiative was undertaken to research thoroughly the whole area
of Radioactivity and the Age of The Earth. The
RATE project began as a cooperative venture between the Institute for Creation Research
(ICR), the Creation Research Society (CRS) and Creation Ministries International
(CMI). (Our contribution was mostly providing the expertise of geologist
Dr Andrew Snelling; however, when he commenced work with ICR, the project
rightly reverted to a joint project of ICR/CRS.)
With the release of several key peer-reviewed papers at the recent ICC (International
Conference on Creationism), it is clear that RATE has made some fantastic progress,
with real breakthroughs in this area.
The main ones of these will be described and summarized in this paper, but first
I want to give congratulations and credit to ICR. Even though a substantial proportion
of the scientists working on this project have not been actual ICR staff, ICR’s
initiative and perseverance, and in particular the patient skilful coordination
of their Dr Larry Vardiman had the major role in getting things to this point this
quickly.
Exciting news on ‘ancient’ granites
When physicist Dr Russell Humphreys was still at Sandia
National Laboratories (he now works full-time for ICR), he and
Dr John Baumgardner (still with Los Alamos National Laboratory) were both
convinced that they knew the direction in which to look for the definitive answer
to the radiometric dating puzzle.
Others had tried—and for some, the search went on for a while in the early
RATE days—to find the answer in geological processes. But Drs Humphreys and
Baumgardner realized that there were too many independent lines of evidence (the
variety of elements used in ‘standard’ radioisotope dating, mature uranium
radiohalos, fission track dating and more) that indicated that huge amounts of radioactive
decay had actually taken place. It would be hard to imagine that geologic processes
could explain all these. Rather, there was likely to be a single, unifying answer
that concerned the nuclear decay processes themselves.
Since, from the eyewitness testimony of God’s Word, the billions of years
that such vast amounts of radioactive processes would normally suggest had not taken
place, it was clear that the assumption of a constant slow decay process was wrong.
There must have been speeded-up decay, perhaps in a huge burst associated with Creation
Week and/or a separate burst at the time of the Flood.
There is now powerful independent confirmatory evidence that at least one episode
of drastically accelerated decay has indeed been the case, building on the work
of Dr Robert Gentry on helium retention in zircons. The landmark RATE paper1,
though technical, can be summarized as follows:
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When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium,
a very light, inert gas which readily escapes from rock.
-
Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites,
contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
-
By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals,
one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years
must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned
to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
-
There is a significant amount of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’
still inside the zircons. This is at first glance surprising for long-agers, because
of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive
atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely
be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually
and not accumulating.
-
Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring
the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers
reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project)
to a world-class expert to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium
does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results
show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since
this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not
be older than between 4,000 and 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand
years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay
has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to
give a date of 5680 (+/- 2000) years.
The paper looks at the various avenues a long-ager might take by which to wriggle
out of these powerful implications, but there seems to be little hope for them unless
they can show that the techniques used to obtain the results were seriously (and
mysteriously, having been performed by a world-class non-creationist expert) flawed.
More great news on radiocarbon
It’s long been known that radiocarbon (which should disappear in only a few
tens of thousands of years at the most2) keeps
popping up reliably in samples (like coal, oil, gas, etc.) which are supposed to
be ‘millions of years’ old. For instance, CMI has over the years commissioned
and funded the radiocarbon testing of a number of wood samples from ‘old’
sites (e.g. with Jurassic fossils, inside Triassic sandstone, burnt by Tertiary
basalt) and these were published (by then staff geologist Dr Andrew Snelling) in
Creation magazine and Journal
of Creation. In each case, with contamination eliminated, the result
has been in the thousands of years, i.e. C-14 was present when it ‘shouldn’t
have been’. These results encouraged the rest of the RATE team to investigate
C-14 further, building on the literature reviews of creationist M.D. Dr Paul Giem.
In another very important paper presented at this year’s ICC, scientists from
the RATE group summarized the pertinent facts and presented further experimental
data. The bottom line is that virtually all biological specimens, no matter how
‘old’ they are supposed to be, show measurable C-14 levels.3
This effectively limits the age of all buried biota to less than (at most) 250,000
years. (When one takes into account the likely much lower ratio of radioactive to
‘normal’ carbon pre-Flood4, it brings
it right down to within the biblical ‘ballpark’.)
Interestingly, specimens which appear to definitely be pre-Flood seem to have C-14
present, too, and importantly, these cluster around a lower relative amount of C-14.
This suggests that some C-14 was primordial, and not produced by cosmic rays—thus
limiting the age of the entire earth to only a few thousand years.
This latter suggestion about primordial C-14 appears to have been somewhat spectacularly
supported when Dr Baumgardner sent a diamond for C-14 dating. It was the first time
this had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—i.e. the diamond,
formed deep inside the earth in a ‘Precambrian’ layer, nevertheless
contained radioactive carbon, even though it ‘shouldn’t have’.
This is exceptionally striking evidence, because a diamond has remarkably powerful
lattice bonds, so there is no way that subsequent biological contamination can be
expected to find its way into the interior.
The diamond’s carbon-dated ‘age’ of <58,000 years is thus an
upper limit for the age of the whole earth. And this age is brought down still further
now that the helium diffusion results have so strongly affirmed dramatic past acceleration
of radioactive decay.5
C-14 labs have no real answer to this problem, namely that all the ‘vast-age’
specimens they measure still have C-14. Labelling this detectable C-14 with such
words as ‘contamination’ and ‘background’ is completely
unhelpful in explaining its source, as the RATE group’s careful analyses and
discussions have shown. But it is no problem or mystery at all if the uniformitarian/long-age
assumptions are laid to one side and the real history of the world, given in Scripture,
is taken seriously. The C-14 is there, quite simply, because it hasn’t had
time to decay yet. The world just isn’t that old!
The C-14 results are an independent but powerful confirmation of the stunning helium-diffusion
results. 2003 looks like going down as a bad year for megachronophiles (lovers of
long ages), but a good year for lovers of the Word of God.
Postscript: In addition to the book expected in 2005 reporting the final
results of the RATE project, the project expects to publish a book for laymen summarizing
the project shortly thereafter. Dr Don DeYoung will be
the author. He has written several popular books on creation science and has been on the RATE since its inception. His grasp of the details of the project and
his excellent writing skills should combine to produce a highly readable book for
creationist laymen.
Related resources
References and notes
- Humphreys, D. et al., Helium diffusion rates
support accelerated nuclear decay,
www.icr.org/pdf/research/Helium_ICC_7-22-03.pdf.
- Even with the most sensitive AMS techniques used today, nary
an atom of C-14 should be present after 250,000 years.
- Baumgardner, J. et al., Measurable 14C
in fossilized organic materials: confirming the young earth creation-flood model,
www.icr.org/pdf/research/RATE_ICC_Baumgardner.pdf.
- Factors which would lower the ratio: (1) More C-12 in the biosphere (more land area,
higher CO2), (2) less C-14 production due to stronger magnetic field
deflecting cosmic rays better, (3) C-14 starts building up at creation, so it would
only have had 1,600 years to build up, nowhere near equilibrium.
- This burst of accelerated decay would be expected to have a greater effect, proportionately,
the longer the half-life. Compared to the effect on a uranium isotope with a half-life
of billions of years, the effect of speeded-up decay on C-14, with its half-life
of the order of 5,000 years, would be much less, which would explain why there is
still some of this primordial C-14 left. Other papers by RATE scientists at this
ICC dealt with theoretical grounds for this (by Dr Eugene Chaffin, ref. 6) and also
gave further supportive evidence from isochron dates for this varying effect (by
Dr Steve Austin, Dr Andrew Snelling
and Bill Hoesch, ref. 7). (‘Good’ isochrons obtained for different decay
chains within the same rock sample, which should have all registered the same ‘date’,
varied from one another in a manner consistent with this.)
- Chaffin, E., Accelerated decay: theoretical models,
www.icr.org/pdf/research/RATE_ICC_Chaffin.pdf.
- Snelling, A., Hoesch, W. and Austin, S., Radioisotopes
in the diabase sill (Upper Precambrian) at Bass Rapids, Grand Canyon, Arizona: an
application and test of the isochron dating method,
www.icr.org/pdf/research/ICCBassRapidsSill_2-%20AAS_SA_and_WH.pdf.
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