RATE II: Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative, (Volume II), L. Vardiman et al., eds. (San Diego, CA: Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society, 2005)

Abstract

A remarkable discovery made over the past twenty-five years 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 ¹⁴C. Because the lifetime of ¹⁴C is so brief, these AMS measurements pose an obvious challenge to the standard geological timescale that assigns millions to hundreds of million of years to this part of the rock record. With a half-life of 5730 years, ¹⁴C 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 ¹⁴C remaining is only 3 × 10-53 of the initial ¹⁴C concentration—so vanishingly small as to exclude even a single ¹⁴C atom in a beginning mass of ¹⁴C equal to the mass of the earth itself. However, in samples with uniformitarian ages between one and 500 million years, the peer-reviewed radiocarbon literature documents scores of examples of ¹⁴C/C ratios in the range 0.1–0.5 percent of the modern ¹⁴C/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 ¹⁴C/C ratio of these samples appears to be uncorrelated with their position in the geological record. RATE’s own measurement of ¹⁴C levels in ten coal samples using one of the world’s best AMS laboratories strongly confirms both this reported range in ¹⁴C/C ratio and the lack of dependence of this ratio on position in the rock record. In terms of ¹⁴C age, if one makes the assumption, as is normally done, that the ¹⁴C/C ratio in these fossilized organisms when they died was close to that of today’s atmosphere, the range in ¹⁴C/C ratio of 0.1–0.5 percent of the modern value corresponds to ¹⁴C ages between 44,000 and 57,000 years. 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. The simultaneous destruction of so much life implies, however, that dramatically more total carbon (now in the form of coal, oil, and oil shale) had to be present in the earth’s biosphere prior to this cataclysmic event. In this case using today’s atmospheric ¹⁴C/C ratio as the initial ¹⁴C/C ratio for this fossil material almost certainly would not be a proper assumption. Using a lower, more realistic estimate for the biospheric ¹⁴C/C ratio prior to this cataclysm reduces the actual ¹⁴C age by roughly a factor of ten from about 50,000 years to a value of about 5000 years. This latter age estimate, of course, 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. Finally, our ¹⁴C RATE project has measured ¹⁴C/C ratios above the AMS threshold in diamonds from a variety of locations. Although more confirmation is needed to justify a strong claim in this regard, these measurements appear to limit the age of the physical earth itself to the range of thousands (as opposed to billions) of years.

Keywords

Carbon-14, global Flood, young earth, RATE II

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