:"''...that my friend is the difference...''": But there is no difference!
:[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 09:16, 6 February 2008 (EST)
::I finally succumbed to one of the bugs that has been going around my wife's school a week ago, so I have been unable to respond to this until now. Apologies. I would like to suggest that schools install sheepdips by the main entrance to make the little buggers more hygenic.
:: Anyway - TerryH, your comments made me groan a great deal. The supposed problems with the age of the old lava dome at Mt St Helens is a very old chestnut that was exploded years ago. Let's start off with basic vulcanology - it is a massive mistake to think that dating a volcanic eruption depends on analysing the lava, as there are some problems with that. For one thing - what on earth makes you think that the lava that is erupting is formed then and there? Mt St Helens is erupting right now, it has been for the past 4 years. So far all its doing is pushing up lava that is identical to the lava of the 1980-1986 eruption. It's basically clearing its throat, before fresher lava comes up (sorry for the metaphor, but it works). That lava was not formed in 1980. It's been down there for a while. That's the way that it works - magma collects in the main magma chamber as it seeps up from far below. Mt St Helens is a part of the Cascades subduction zone - the magma there is the light, relatively frothy rock that was scraped off the ocean crust as it descended below the North American Plate a very long time ago - as much as 500,000 to 1 million years ago. It rose into the magma chamber, pooled there, and was finally erupted. Saying that lava seems to be old for an eruption that happened 20 years ago is merely pointing out the way that vulcanology works - you're actually underlining the fact that this is an old world and that volcanic eruptions are, chemically speaking, not instant events! So thanks, TerryH, you just proved my point!
::As for the so-called problems with the K-AR method, there aren't any. Asking anyone to use the K-AR method to get the age of the 1980-86 eruption is like using Big Ben to measure how tall an ant is. The half-life of potassium-40 is rather long - 1,250 million years. Plus a few thousand years are not enough time for 40Ar to accumulate in a sample at high enough concentrations to be detected and assessed. As a result, the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old.
::As I said, this old chestnut has long been exploded. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 18:10, 6 February 2008 (EST)
:::Now let me get this straight: you're only ''now'' saying that the lava that appears at an eruption should still contain a great deal of daughter nuclide? That doesn't make a bit of sense to me. I think you're misrepresenting the science here, and I demand that you produce a citation that the rest of us can check out for a comment that I consider outrageous.--[[User:TerryH|TerryH]]<sup>[[User talk:TerryH|Talk]]</sup> 19:01, 6 February 2008 (EST)
::: One of the main problems with Darkmind1970's post is that he's essentially explaining why radiometric dates can be wrong (because the rock material is older than when it was laid down), which is really a tacit admission, that you can't rely on radiometric dates, just as the creationists have been claiming for years! A second problem is that he essentially claims that you need to know how old an object is before you can use a dating method to see how old it is! Kinda defeats the purpose, I would think! Third, he fails to adequately explain ''why'' K-Ar dating cannot be used on young objects. If a few thousand years is insufficient to accumulate enough argon to detect, how come they detected it and were therefore able to supply a date? Surely his logic means that anything younger than 6,000 years would give an age of zero? But it didn't! His argument is self-defeating. If you date a sample at 2,800,000 years (which TerryH quoted above), according to Darkmind1970, it could be (a) 2,800,000 years old (i.e. the method works when used correctly), or (b) younger than 6,000 years (i.e. the method didn't work because it wasn't used correctly). So how do you decide which it is? If he is correct, then ''such dating methods cannot be used to demonstrate that items are more than 6,000 years old''! [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:33, 6 February 2008 (EST)
::::Actually I'm saying nothing of the kind. What I am saying is that K-AR dating of relatively recent events will give you somewhat fuzzy data because it's hard to be date something that's a few tens of years old when the half-life of potassium-40 is 1,250 million years. There are other forms of radiometric dating that will give better result, by using elements that have a far shorter half-life. Using K-AR dating on relatively recent material is like using a 12-inch ruler to measure the length of a bacterium.
::::TerryH - please read up on some basic vulcanology, as what I said was not outrageous. I may not have phrased it very well, as I was exhausted when I wrote it, but it's still true. You want a citation - here's one. http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm
[[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 08:44, 7 February 2008 (EST)
::::: "''Actually I'm saying nothing of the kind.''": Despite your protestation, you've done nothing to show how anything I've said is wrong.
::::: "''Using K-AR dating on relatively recent material is like using a 12-inch ruler to measure the length of a bacterium.''": I understand that, but I don't think ''you'' do. If you do use a 12-inch ruler to measure the length of a bacterium, what measurement will you get? Answer: you'd get somewhere between 0" and 0.1" (assuming the ruler was marked in tenths of an inch). For measuring a bacterium, that would be nowhere near precise enough. Correct so far? But the measurement, although nowhere near precise enough, would be essentially ''correct'', i.e. a bacterium ''is'' between 0" and 0.1" long. Am I still correct so far? To put it another way, if you do use a 12-inch ruler, you are not going read from the ruler that the bacterium is three inches long, are you? But that is the analogous situation with the dating we are talking about. We've measured the bacterium as being three inches long! Creationists say "that shows that the ruler is not reliable". You say, "the ruler should not be used to measure bacteria". Now perhaps the ruler ''should not'' be used to measure bacteria, but that hardly explains the discrepancy whereby the ruler showed the bacterium to be three inches long. Despite the inapplicability of using the ruler, it still shows that the ruler does not provide accurate (correct) measurements.
:::::[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 20:54, 7 February 2008 (EST)
Neither you ([[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]]) nor Dr. Henke understand the issue. And Dr. Henke's excuses are the lamest I have ever seen. "The mass spec was dirty." That's practically an admission that Geochron's quality control stinks! No wonder they don't do [[Potassium|K]]-[[Argon|Ar]] dating anymore--maybe they ''did'' lose accreditation, as any hospital laboratory would have lost its accreditation had they made a comparable error.
Dr. Henke makes several other logical errors that are more debilitating:{{Cquote|In contrast to Austin ''et al.'''s juvenile attacks on K-Ar dating, geochronologists confirm the reality of radiometric dates by using multiple methods...and/or comparing their results with fossil, paleomagnetic or astronomical data.}}
First of all, if several clocks just happen to agree on a value, that doesn't make the value correct; it could simply mean that the clocksetters colluded on the same erroneous consensus or that they all consulted the same erroneous clock. And in fact, multiple methods ''have'' proved less than consistent. See Snelling, Andrew, "[http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-376.pdf Radioisotope Dating of Grand Canyon Rocks: Another Devastating Failure for Long-Age Geology]," ''Institute for Creation Research'', Impact Article 376. That last article is part of a body of research designed to investigate the basis for old "apparent ages"--and the inconsistency of radiocarbon and radiomineral dates obtained from specimens collected at the same site.
Can you name ''any'' radiomineral dating method that would be ''at all'' suitable for showing that any given mineral is young? What is the youngest rock that anyone has ever dated? I'll answer that question for you: that "youngest rock" has an apparent age of 700,000 years. ''You couldn't even reliably date the eruption of Mount Vesuvius'' did you not have [[Pliny the Younger]]'s diary of the destruction and evacuation of [[Pompeii]].--[[User:TerryH|TerryH]]<sup>[[User talk:TerryH|Talk]]</sup> 09:23, 7 February 2008 (EST)
:Actually we can very easily date the eruption of AD79 without Pliny. We've got all the evidence from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Which can be very precisely dated by the coins, pottery, etc. Context. And please keep it civil. You may not agree with what I have to say, but shouting about citations and not knowing what I'm talking about is hardly reasoned discourse. Look at Henke's other arguments if you find his talk of a dirty mass spec laughable. It doesn't change the fact that dating lava is interesting because it contains old and new elements. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 11:50, 7 February 2008 (EST)
::And where are the coins, pots, and so on that can tell us that any rock is seven hundred thousand to two million to four point three billion years old? And your premises about the dating of old lava are irrelevant, because GeoChron never said a peep about that until Austin published his rather embarrassing findings--embarrassing, that is, for them.--[[User:TerryH|TerryH]]<sup>[[User talk:TerryH|Talk]]</sup> 13:14, 7 February 2008 (EST)
== Three questions: ==
# in regard to sedimentary rock: the Genesis account suggests that the Earth was flooded for about a year. The section "Pure Sedimentary Layers" of this article suggests that the St. Peter Sandstone, found across the US, was laid down during this flood. It is unlikely that, when the flood waters receded, a layer of rock several meters thick was left behind that had not been there before; is it proposed that 75-80% of the Earth's surface was simultaneously covered in meters of silt, which rapidly became rock? Bearing in mind that the Pyramids, as well as many other ancient structures, used sedimentary rocks in their construction, the lithification would have had to have been extraordinarily fast.
#In regard to the suggested dating of 2350 BC: I understand that the Flood Geology model rejects the use of radiometric dating. I will not argue this, as I do not feel qualified to discuss the technology. I do wonder, however: what is the Creationist view on dendrochronology, the study of tree rings? Bristlecone pine trees in the US have been shown to have started growing in 2800 BC, and older trees found in the same region date back to 6500 BC. Oak trees in Germany have been dated back even farther. It would seem certain that no tree could survive being under kilometers of water for a full year, yet these trees evidently survived.
#The New World and the Far East: There were native people in the New World after the flood. Did they survive the flood? Were they travellers from the Middle East, as the Mormons claim? Conversely, civilization in China is certainly old, and while precise dates may be debated, predates the postulated timing of the Flood. Chinese history does not describe a catastrophic flood that wiped out the nation's population, and does not describe its repopulation afterward.
Please understand that I am not trying to tear down Flood Geology; rather, I feel that everyone is entitled to their own views on the history of our planet. Like any theory, Flood Geology must adapt to fix flaws in its postulates; if these questions can be answered, it would improve the theory and make it more robust. --[[User:TommyAtkins|TommyAtkins]] 10:05, 1 June 2009 (EDT)
:Actually there is a flood story in China remarkably similar to the Genesis account. The view on tree ring dating is that it should be used carefully. In good years, more than one ring can form, and also some of the pre-flood dates are actually obtained by methods other than a sample from the living tree itself. Not sure about your rock question. [[User:AddisonDM|AddisonDM]] 10:36, 1 June 2009 (EDT)
::* If the Chinese flood story to which you refer is the one found in the ''Hihking'', mentioned on [[Great Flood]], the problem is that the only references to this supposed "Chinese classic" are from sites discussing the Flood; a Google search for 'hihking china -hiking' (because there are many pages about hiking in China) has only 131 results, while a search for "I Ching" or "The Art of War" returns millions of hits. More notably, other Chinese sources, such as the ''Classic of History'' or the ''Records of the Grand Historian''--which covers the period around and immediately after the suggested date for the flood--make no mention of such an event. While it is in no way an unbiased source, [http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CG/CG202_2.html TalkOrigins claims] that the ''Hihking'' cannot be traced back any further than the 1930's, while other Chinese tales of floods bear little similarity to the Genesis account.
::* Tree ring dating should certainly be used carefully, just like any other method of dating. No-one claims that they can pin a certain event to 2478 BC based on tree ring dating, just as it is impossible to claim to know the exact second that, say, the Titanic struck the iceberg. It is possible, however, to gain a fairly accurate picture. Although extra or missing rings would introduce some error to any measurement, it must be unlikely that the error should be so great that a population of trees dated back to 8000 BC, or even to 4500 BC, as in the case of the Bristlecone pine, is actually more recent than 2300 BC. Also, it appears that this method is only reinforced by other methods, such as radiometric dating; it does not depend upon them to be useful. If a living tree has, say, 4500 rings, and the oldest 500 match up with rings on another, nearby, dead tree that goes back 4000 rings further, it can be assumed that trees in that region have been growing uninterrupted for 8000 rings. Since double or missing rings are caused by climatic variation, which can be verified through any number of other methods, it should not be the case that these scientists have made an error of 50% or more despite all efforts to avoid it
:::* On the matter of dendrochronology and other methods being used in circular logic: [http://www.wsl.ch/staff/felix.kaiser/PDFs/Friedrich_Dendro_RC04%20.pdf this source], as well as others online, show that carbon dating and other methods are calibrated off of tree-ring records, and that the trees' ages are not based off of other methods. The fact that carbon-dated results match with tree-ring dating is not a fundamental pillar of dendrochronology, only an additional support.
:::--[[User:TommyAtkins|TommyAtkins]] 12:14, 1 June 2009 (EDT)
::::It looks like you actually know alot about this. The Chinese flood story was discovered in the 1930s but there's no reason to beleive it was completely made up. It may have been embellished, but China, just like virtually every ancient culture, has a tradition of a catastropic flood. To say that sites discussing the flood discuss the flood story does not prove anything. Also, study of ancient Chinese writing from the Shang dynasty's oracle bones shows similarity between Chinese writing and the Genesis account. See http://creation.com/chinese-characters-and-genesis. (I can quote CMI if you can quote talk.origins.
::::I did not say that tree ring dating or radiometric dating are circular logic. No tree has ever been dated much past the estimated Flood year using core samples from the living tree alone. See http://creation.com/living-tree-8000-years-older-than-christ. [[User:AddisonDM|AddisonDM]] 23:29, 1 June 2009 (EDT)
== Solution vs Suspension ==
OK, a small experiment. Put a handful of sand into a jar of water and give it a shake. Does the sand dissolve? No, of course not. Sand isn't soluble in water. It can be SUSPENDED in water, but not dissolved. --[[User:AriannaK|AriannaK]] 18:47, 14 February 2012 (EST)
:James Wilson, please stop reverting my edits. We both know that sand doesn't dissolve in water, so why do you keep putting this back in the article? --[[User:AriannaK|AriannaK]] 18:59, 14 February 2012 (EST)
::Please provide a cite from a reliable source.--[[User:JamesWilson|James Wilson]] 19:01, 14 February 2012 (EST)
:::Sure. While I'm finding one you can give me a cite to say that sand ''does'' dissolve in water. --[[User:AriannaK|AriannaK]] 19:03, 14 February 2012 (EST)
::::Here you go: [http://pearsonkt.com/summaryStreetOT/texts/Sci-National-Grade-4/iText/products/0-328-34278-5/unitc/ch11/331.html] Sand does not dissolve in water. --[[User:AriannaK|AriannaK]] 19:05, 14 February 2012 (EST)
:::::Fair enough. Insert it in the article if you will. Our homeschool readers will surely be able to appreciate it.--[[User:JamesWilson|James Wilson]] 19:25, 14 February 2012 (EST)