Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth
One of the foremost objections to the Bible’s account of creation and the Flood is the time scale. Mainstream science asserts that the earth itself is some 4.5 billion years old and that multicellular life has existed for about 600 million years. Yet the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 constrain the age of the earth to approximately 6,000 years. If the Bible is reliable in all matters on which it speaks, how is this huge discrepancy in time scales to be reconciled?
In 1997 a team of seven Ph.D. scientists who also held that the Bible is fully God-breathed and reliable undertook a research effort to address this question head-on. Because the primary methods from which the multi-billion-year age for the earth is derived involves nuclear decay of long half-life radioactive isotopes of elements like uranium, potassium, rubidium, and neodymium, the focus of the effort was to investigate these methods to determine if there might be an overlooked clue that could explain the vast discrepancy. This eight-year effort came to be known as Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (or RATE for short) and was completed in 2005. Its technical findings were published in an 800-page technical report entitled Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative. It is available online at http://icr.org/rate2, where each of its ten chapters is posted as a separate, downloadable PDF file.
The RATE team was exuberant over the results which they conclude God had unveiled to them. In summary, they identified multiple independent lines of radioisotope evidence that the earth is merely thousands, rather than billions, of years old. They found what they consider to be clear scientific support for the conclusion that nuclear decay rates have been dramatically different, by many factors of ten, during brief episodes in the past than they are today. These brief episodes of rapid nuclear decay left hundreds of millions to billions of years’ worth of nuclear daughter products in a large fraction of the earth’s rocks. Dating methods that do not account for this non-uniform history of nuclear decay, but instead assume that nuclear decay rates have been invariant with time, therefore yield rock ages dramatically greater than the actual age.
The study deemed the most significant in support of this conclusion was the one that measured the diffusion (or migration) rate of helium in zircon crystals. This research found that the experimentally determined helium diffusion rate permits the high levels of helium measured in the zircons to persist no more than about 6,000 years. The helium in the zircons is the product of nuclear decay of uranium and its daughter products. This very short age is in stark conflict with the 1.5-billion-year age for these zircons provided by uranium-lead methods that assume time-invariant rates of nuclear decay. This short age result based on helium diffusion rates was supported by findings from two other RATE studies, one on the phenomenon of polonium radiohalos and the other on the ubiquitous presence of C-14 in organic materials dated by conventional radioisotope methods at millions to hundreds of millions of years. For convenience, the chapters describing the RATE findings for these three studies are provided below.
The 2005 book Thousands not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution, Questioning the Age of the Earth by Donald DeYoung is a less technical summary of the RATE findings. A Kindle version is available.
2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 2)
In 1982 Robert Gentry found amazingly high retentions of nuclear-decay-generated helium in microscopic zircon (ZrSiO4) crystals recovered from a borehole in Precambrian granitic rock at Fenton Hill, New Mexico. In 2001 RATE contracted with a high-precision laboratory to measure the rate of helium diffusion out of these zircons. The measured rates resoundingly confirm a numerical prediction we made based on the reported retentions and a young age. Combining rates and retentions gives a He diffusion age of 6,000 ± 2,000 years. This contradicts the uniformitarian age of 1.5 billion years based on nuclear decay products in the same zircons. These data strongly support our hypothesis of episodes of highly accelerated nuclear decay occurring within the past few thousands of years. Such acceleration of nuclear decay rates shrinks the conventional billions-of-years timescale based on time-invariant rates down to the 6,000-year timescale of the Bible.
Young Helium Diffusion Age of Zircons Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay
2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 3)
This study involved granite samples from more than fifty distinct granite bodies in Australia, North America, and Europe and more than 30,000 individual radiohalos obtained by microscopic examination of mica minerals within these granite samples. The dominant types of radiohalos identified were 210Po and 238U halos, with smaller numbers of 214Po, 218Po, and 232Th halos. The short half-lives of 218Po, 214Po, and 210Po of 3.1 minutes, 164 microseconds, and 138 days, respectively, seem to demand that Po radiohalos form in correspondingly brief spans of time. If the Po radiohalos were formed in just a few days while the fully-formed 238U radiohalos were simultaneously generated by at least 100 million years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay, radioisotope decay logically must have been accelerated. This implies that conventional radioisotope dating of rocks based on assuming constancy of decay rates must be profoundly in error. The conclusion is that accelerated radioisotope decay of 238U in zircons within the biotites rapidly formed the 238U radiohalos and produced large quantities of the short-lived 222Rn and Po isotopes. Hydrothermal fluids released by the cooling granitic magmas then transported those isotopes along the biotites’ cleavage planes to deposit the Po isotopes in chemically conducive, adjacent lattice defect sites, on average only 1 mm or less distant. The hydrothermal fluids progressively replenished the supply of Po isotopes to the deposition sites as the Po isotopes decayed to form the Po radiohalos. Because of the annealing of α-tracks above 150°C, all the radiohalos only formed below 150°C. However, the U-decay and hydrothermal fluid transport started while the granitic rocks were crystallizing at higher temperatures. Therefore, the granitic magmas must have cooled rapidly or else the short-lived Po isotopes would have decayed before radiohalos could have formed. It is thus estimated that granitic plutons must have cooled within 6–10 days, and that the various Po radiohalos formed within hours to just a few days.
Radiohalos in Granites: Evidence for Accelerated Nuclear Decay
2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 8)
A remarkable finding since the early 1980’s is that organic samples from every level in the Phanerozoic portion of the geological record, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, display significant and reproducible amounts of C-14. Because the lifetime of C-14 is so brief, these AMS measurements pose an obvious challenge to the standard geological timescale that assigns millions to hundreds of millions of years to this part of the rock record. With a half-life of 5,730 years, C-14 decays to levels undetectable by any currently available technique after only 100,000 years (17.5 half-lives). After one million years (175 half-lives), the amount of C-14 remaining is only 3 × 10-53 of the initial C-14 concentration—so vanishingly small as to exclude even a single C-14 atom in a beginning mass of C-14 equal to the mass of the earth itself. However, in samples with uniformitarian ages between one and 500 million years, the secular peer-reviewed radiocarbon literature documents scores of examples of C-14/C ratios in the range 0.1–0.5 percent of the modern C-14/C ratio. The lower limit of this range is a factor of ten above the detection threshold of most AMS laboratories in the world. Another noteworthy observation is that the C-14/C ratio of these samples appears to be uncorrelated with their position in the geological record. RATE’s own measurement of C-14 levels in ten coal samples using one of the world’s best AMS laboratories strongly confirms both this reported range in C-14/C ratio and the lack of dependence of this ratio on position in the rock record. A straightforward but startling inference from these AMS data is that all but the very youngest fossil material in the geological record was buried contemporaneously only thousands of years ago in what must have been a major global cataclysm. This is consistent with the Biblical account of a global Flood that destroyed most of the life on the planet, both plants and animals, in a single brief cataclysm some four to five millennia ago.
C-14 Evidence for a Recent Global Flood and a Young Earth
2003 Fifth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
An astonishing finding since the early 1980’s has been that, almost without exception, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, organic samples from every portion of the fossil-bearing sedimentary record show consistent levels of C-14 that are well above the AMS detection level. Because of C-14's short half-life of 5,730 years, the conclusion implied by these measurements is that the organisms in all but the topmost sediment layers were buried contemporaneously merely thousands of years ago. This is consistent with the biblical account of a global Flood that destroyed most of the air-breathing life on the planet in a single brief cataclysm just a few thousand years before present.
Measurable C-14 in Fossilized Organic Materials: Confirming the Young Earth Creation-Flood Model
2012 Journal of Creation 26(3)
The RATE research effort provided multiple lines of evidence that nuclear transmutation rates were dramatically higher during intervals in the past than they are observed to be today. This implies that the assumption of constant rates throughout Earth’s history, used routinely by radioisotope dating laboratories to translate isotope ratios into time, is inappropriate. Yet the question remains as to whether such measured isotope ratios might nevertheless provide valid indicators of relative time. If nuclear transformation rates at every instant are uniform throughout the earth—and there seems to be nothing to suggest otherwise—the answer seems to be yes. For creationists, a trustworthy means for determining relative ages of rocks is a tool of immense value in unravelling the earth’s physical history and gaining insight into the processes involved. This article encourages creationists who previously have been hesitant to exploit this tool of radioisotope measurement to begin to apply it to good advantage.
Do Radioisotope Methods Yield Trustworthy Relative Ages for the Earth’s Rocks?
In 1997 a team of seven Ph.D. scientists who also held that the Bible is fully God-breathed and reliable undertook a research effort to address this question head-on. Because the primary methods from which the multi-billion-year age for the earth is derived involves nuclear decay of long half-life radioactive isotopes of elements like uranium, potassium, rubidium, and neodymium, the focus of the effort was to investigate these methods to determine if there might be an overlooked clue that could explain the vast discrepancy. This eight-year effort came to be known as Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (or RATE for short) and was completed in 2005. Its technical findings were published in an 800-page technical report entitled Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative. It is available online at http://icr.org/rate2, where each of its ten chapters is posted as a separate, downloadable PDF file.
The RATE team was exuberant over the results which they conclude God had unveiled to them. In summary, they identified multiple independent lines of radioisotope evidence that the earth is merely thousands, rather than billions, of years old. They found what they consider to be clear scientific support for the conclusion that nuclear decay rates have been dramatically different, by many factors of ten, during brief episodes in the past than they are today. These brief episodes of rapid nuclear decay left hundreds of millions to billions of years’ worth of nuclear daughter products in a large fraction of the earth’s rocks. Dating methods that do not account for this non-uniform history of nuclear decay, but instead assume that nuclear decay rates have been invariant with time, therefore yield rock ages dramatically greater than the actual age.
The study deemed the most significant in support of this conclusion was the one that measured the diffusion (or migration) rate of helium in zircon crystals. This research found that the experimentally determined helium diffusion rate permits the high levels of helium measured in the zircons to persist no more than about 6,000 years. The helium in the zircons is the product of nuclear decay of uranium and its daughter products. This very short age is in stark conflict with the 1.5-billion-year age for these zircons provided by uranium-lead methods that assume time-invariant rates of nuclear decay. This short age result based on helium diffusion rates was supported by findings from two other RATE studies, one on the phenomenon of polonium radiohalos and the other on the ubiquitous presence of C-14 in organic materials dated by conventional radioisotope methods at millions to hundreds of millions of years. For convenience, the chapters describing the RATE findings for these three studies are provided below.
The 2005 book Thousands not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution, Questioning the Age of the Earth by Donald DeYoung is a less technical summary of the RATE findings. A Kindle version is available.
2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 2)
In 1982 Robert Gentry found amazingly high retentions of nuclear-decay-generated helium in microscopic zircon (ZrSiO4) crystals recovered from a borehole in Precambrian granitic rock at Fenton Hill, New Mexico. In 2001 RATE contracted with a high-precision laboratory to measure the rate of helium diffusion out of these zircons. The measured rates resoundingly confirm a numerical prediction we made based on the reported retentions and a young age. Combining rates and retentions gives a He diffusion age of 6,000 ± 2,000 years. This contradicts the uniformitarian age of 1.5 billion years based on nuclear decay products in the same zircons. These data strongly support our hypothesis of episodes of highly accelerated nuclear decay occurring within the past few thousands of years. Such acceleration of nuclear decay rates shrinks the conventional billions-of-years timescale based on time-invariant rates down to the 6,000-year timescale of the Bible.
Young Helium Diffusion Age of Zircons Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay
2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 3)
This study involved granite samples from more than fifty distinct granite bodies in Australia, North America, and Europe and more than 30,000 individual radiohalos obtained by microscopic examination of mica minerals within these granite samples. The dominant types of radiohalos identified were 210Po and 238U halos, with smaller numbers of 214Po, 218Po, and 232Th halos. The short half-lives of 218Po, 214Po, and 210Po of 3.1 minutes, 164 microseconds, and 138 days, respectively, seem to demand that Po radiohalos form in correspondingly brief spans of time. If the Po radiohalos were formed in just a few days while the fully-formed 238U radiohalos were simultaneously generated by at least 100 million years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay, radioisotope decay logically must have been accelerated. This implies that conventional radioisotope dating of rocks based on assuming constancy of decay rates must be profoundly in error. The conclusion is that accelerated radioisotope decay of 238U in zircons within the biotites rapidly formed the 238U radiohalos and produced large quantities of the short-lived 222Rn and Po isotopes. Hydrothermal fluids released by the cooling granitic magmas then transported those isotopes along the biotites’ cleavage planes to deposit the Po isotopes in chemically conducive, adjacent lattice defect sites, on average only 1 mm or less distant. The hydrothermal fluids progressively replenished the supply of Po isotopes to the deposition sites as the Po isotopes decayed to form the Po radiohalos. Because of the annealing of α-tracks above 150°C, all the radiohalos only formed below 150°C. However, the U-decay and hydrothermal fluid transport started while the granitic rocks were crystallizing at higher temperatures. Therefore, the granitic magmas must have cooled rapidly or else the short-lived Po isotopes would have decayed before radiohalos could have formed. It is thus estimated that granitic plutons must have cooled within 6–10 days, and that the various Po radiohalos formed within hours to just a few days.
Radiohalos in Granites: Evidence for Accelerated Nuclear Decay
2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 8)
A remarkable finding since the early 1980’s is that organic samples from every level in the Phanerozoic portion of the geological record, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, display significant and reproducible amounts of C-14. Because the lifetime of C-14 is so brief, these AMS measurements pose an obvious challenge to the standard geological timescale that assigns millions to hundreds of millions of years to this part of the rock record. With a half-life of 5,730 years, C-14 decays to levels undetectable by any currently available technique after only 100,000 years (17.5 half-lives). After one million years (175 half-lives), the amount of C-14 remaining is only 3 × 10-53 of the initial C-14 concentration—so vanishingly small as to exclude even a single C-14 atom in a beginning mass of C-14 equal to the mass of the earth itself. However, in samples with uniformitarian ages between one and 500 million years, the secular peer-reviewed radiocarbon literature documents scores of examples of C-14/C ratios in the range 0.1–0.5 percent of the modern C-14/C ratio. The lower limit of this range is a factor of ten above the detection threshold of most AMS laboratories in the world. Another noteworthy observation is that the C-14/C ratio of these samples appears to be uncorrelated with their position in the geological record. RATE’s own measurement of C-14 levels in ten coal samples using one of the world’s best AMS laboratories strongly confirms both this reported range in C-14/C ratio and the lack of dependence of this ratio on position in the rock record. A straightforward but startling inference from these AMS data is that all but the very youngest fossil material in the geological record was buried contemporaneously only thousands of years ago in what must have been a major global cataclysm. This is consistent with the Biblical account of a global Flood that destroyed most of the life on the planet, both plants and animals, in a single brief cataclysm some four to five millennia ago.
C-14 Evidence for a Recent Global Flood and a Young Earth
2003 Fifth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
An astonishing finding since the early 1980’s has been that, almost without exception, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, organic samples from every portion of the fossil-bearing sedimentary record show consistent levels of C-14 that are well above the AMS detection level. Because of C-14's short half-life of 5,730 years, the conclusion implied by these measurements is that the organisms in all but the topmost sediment layers were buried contemporaneously merely thousands of years ago. This is consistent with the biblical account of a global Flood that destroyed most of the air-breathing life on the planet in a single brief cataclysm just a few thousand years before present.
Measurable C-14 in Fossilized Organic Materials: Confirming the Young Earth Creation-Flood Model
2012 Journal of Creation 26(3)
The RATE research effort provided multiple lines of evidence that nuclear transmutation rates were dramatically higher during intervals in the past than they are observed to be today. This implies that the assumption of constant rates throughout Earth’s history, used routinely by radioisotope dating laboratories to translate isotope ratios into time, is inappropriate. Yet the question remains as to whether such measured isotope ratios might nevertheless provide valid indicators of relative time. If nuclear transformation rates at every instant are uniform throughout the earth—and there seems to be nothing to suggest otherwise—the answer seems to be yes. For creationists, a trustworthy means for determining relative ages of rocks is a tool of immense value in unravelling the earth’s physical history and gaining insight into the processes involved. This article encourages creationists who previously have been hesitant to exploit this tool of radioisotope measurement to begin to apply it to good advantage.
Do Radioisotope Methods Yield Trustworthy Relative Ages for the Earth’s Rocks?