then lets talk facts shall we...
Contrary to what is generally believed, it is not just a matter of measuring the amount of potassium-40 and argon-40 in a volcanic rock sample of unknown age, and calculating a date. Unfortunately, before that can be done, we need to know the history of the rock. For example, we need to know how much ‘daughter’ was present in the rock when it formed. In most situations we don’t know since we didn’t measure it, so we need to make an assumption—a guess. It is routinely assumed that there was no argon initially. We also need to know whether potassium-40 or argon-40 have leaked into, or out of, the rock since it formed. Again, we do not know, so we need to make an assumption. It is routinely assumed that no leakage occurred. It is only after we have made these assumptions that we can calculate an ‘age’ for the rock. And when this is done, the ‘age’ of most rocks calculated in this way is usually very great, often millions of years. The Mount St Helens lava dome gives us the opportunity to check these assumptions, because we know it formed just a handful of years ago, between 1980 and 1986.
In June of 1992, Dr Austin collected a 7-kg (15-lb) block of dacite from high on the lava dome. A portion of this sample was crushed and milled into a fine powder. Another piece was crushed and the various mineral crystals were carefully separated out.3 The ‘whole rock’ rock powder and four mineral concentrates were submitted for potassium-argon analysis to Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, MA—a high-quality, professional radioisotope-dating laboratory. The only information provided to the laboratory was that the samples came from dacite and that ‘low argon’ should be expected. The laboratory was not told that the specimen came from the lava dome at Mount St Helens and was only 10 years old.
the results ranged from 340,000 to 2.8 million years! Why? Obviously, the assumptions were wrong, and this invalidates the ‘dating’ method. Probably some argon-40 was incorporated into the rock initially, giving the appearance of great age. Note also that the results from the different samples of the same rock disagree with each other.
It is clear that radioisotope dating is not the ‘gold standard’ of dating methods, or ‘proof’ for millions of years of Earth history. When the method is tested on rocks of known age, it fails miserably. The lava dome at Mount St Helens is not a million years old! At the time of the test, it was only about 10 years old.
Table 1. Potassium-argon ‘ages’ for whole rock and mineral concentrate samples from the lava dome at Mount St Helens (from Austin1).
Sample Age / millions of years
1 Whole rock 0.35 ± 0.05
2 Feldspar, etc. 0.34 ± 0.06
3 Amphibole, etc. 0.9 ± 0.2
4 Pyroxene, etc. 1.7 ± 0.3
5 Pyroxene 2.8 ± 0.6
Radio-Dating in Rubble
Now one can crow all they like, the fact is, attempting to date anything using methods that have zero means of actually proving that the variables surrounding the samples have remained stable and or predictable over millions of years is nothing short of a lie. Also, might i add at this point, does anyone ever question the problem surrounding the big bang...any answer to the question "where did the energy and matter come from that was the big bang? How did it start...did someone poke it?
when millions of years in inserted into the orgin of the big bang issue, where the known answer even from Stephen Hawking was, we dont know...im think the naives ones here are not the creationists!
Please, don't refer to known liars. Steve Austin has a PhD in geology, yet he makes errors that an undergrad would not make. He knew how he was being dishonest when he dated the Mt. Ste. Helens eruptions.
He knows that lay people like you have no idea of how one avoids errors in dating.
Young-Earth Creationist 'Dating' of a Mt. St. Helens Dacite: The Failure of Austin and Swenson to Recognize Obviously Ancient Minerals
"Considering that the half-life of potassium-40 (40K) is fairly long (1,250 million years, McDougall and Harrison, 1999, p. 9), the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old (Dalrymple, 1991, p. 93). A few thousand years are not enough time for 40Ar to accumulate in a sample at high enough concentrations to be detected and quantified. Furthermore, many geochronology laboratories do not have the expensive state-of-the-art equipment to accurately measure argon in samples that are only a few million years old. Specifically, the laboratory personnel that performed the K-Ar dating for Austin et al. Specifically, personnel at
Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, performed the K-Ar dating for Austin et al. This laboratory no longer performs K-Ar dating. However, when they did, their website clearly stated in a footnote that their equipment could not accurately date rocks that are younger than about 2 million years old ("We cannot analyze samples expected to be younger than 2 M.Y."; also see discussions by
Bartelt et al.). With less advanced equipment, 'memory effects' can be a problem with very young samples (Dalrymple, 1969, p. 48). That is, very tiny amounts of argon contaminants from previous analyses may remain within the equipment, which precludes accurate dates for very young samples. For older samples, which contain more 40Ar, the contamination is diluted and has insignificant effects. Considering the statements at the Geochron website and the lowest age limitations of the K-Ar method, why did Austin submit a recently erupted dacite to this laboratory and expect a reliable answer??? Contrary to
Swenson's uninformed claim that ' Dr Austin carefully designed the research to counter all possible objections', Austin clearly demonstrated his inexperience in geochronology when he wasted a lot of money using the K-Ar method on the wrong type of samples."
Did you read that? The lab that he used informed people that they could not accurately date any sample younger than 2 million years. Any date less than two million years from them is effectively zero.
There are rock strata with annual layers. Very similar to tree rings. For example the Green River Formation alone has 5 million annual layers:
Green River Formation - Wikipedia
Creation "geologists" all have to be either liars or know so little that they would not even pass a high school geology class.
