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Radiometric Dating Questions and Answers

Key articles

• How accurate is Carbon-14 (and other radiometric) dating? (From The Creation Answers Book)
• The way it really is: little-known facts about radiometric dating (available in Spanish)
• How dating methods work
• Radioactive dating methods

What is radiocarbon dating? Is it accurate?

• Diamonds: a creationist’s best friend: Radiocarbon in diamonds: enemy of billions of years
• DNA research says Australian Aborigines arrived 50,000 years ago
• Oxidizable carbon ratio dating
• Dating in conflict
• Dating dilemma: fossil wood in ‘ancient’ sandstone
• Geological conflict: young radiocarbon date for ancient fossil wood challenges fossil dating
• The dating game
• Radiocarbon in diamonds: enemy of billions of years
• Tree ring dating (dendrochronology) (available in Spanish)

Are there examples of inaccurate results obtained from the potassium/argon dating method (the most cited method)?

• Radioactive ‘dating’ failure: recent New Zealand lava flows yield ‘ages’ of millions of years
• Excess argon within mineral concentrates from the new dacite lava dome at Mt St Helens volcano
• Radio-dating in rubble
• The pigs took it all
• How do you date a New Zealand volcano?

How can the radiometric dates of millions and billions of years old be so wrong?

• Trial balloons and the age of the earth
• The failure of U-Th-Pb ‘dating’ at Koongarra
• Flaws in dating the earth as ancient
• Conflicting ‘ages’ of Tertiary basalt and contained fossilised wood, Crinum, Central Queensland, Australia
• Radioactive ‘dating’ in conflict!
• National Geographic magazine joins the dating game
• Is the absence of short-lived radionuclides a problem for the biblical timescale?
• Evolutionist debater fails to understand young-earth arguments
• The Oklo natural reactors in Precambrian rocks, Gabon, Africa

Is there any evidence that the radioactive decay rate might not have been constant?

• RATE group reveals exciting break-through!
• Billion-fold acceleration of radioactivity demonstrated in laboratory
• Radioactive decay rate depends on chemical environment
• Helium evidence for a young world continues to confound critics
• Argon diffusion data support RATE’s 6,000-year helium age of the earth

What is the current creationist thinking on radiohalos (formerly called ‘pleochroic halos’)?

• Radiohalos: startling evidence of catastrophic geologic processes on a young earth
• The collapse of geologic time
• New radiohalo find challenges primordial granite claim
• New record of polonium radiohalos, Stone Mountain granite, Georgia (USA)