Helium Diffusion Rates Support Accelerated Nuclear Decay | The Institute for Creation Research
 
Helium Diffusion Rates Support Accelerated Nuclear Decay

Download PDFDownload Helium Diffusion Rates Support Accelerated Nuclear Decay PDF

by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D., Steven A. Austin, Ph.D., John R. Baumgardner, Ph.D., and Andrew A. Snelling, Ph.D.

Presented at the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 4–9, 2003. Published in: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, R. L. Ivey (Ed.), pp. 175–195, 2003.

© 2003 Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Published with permission. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Two decades ago, Robert Gentry and his colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported surprisingly high amounts of nuclear-decay-generated helium in tiny radioactive zircons recovered from Precambrian crystalline rock, the Jemez Granodiorite on the west flank of the volcanic Valles Caldera near Los Alamos, New Mexico (Gentry, Glish, & McBay, 1982). Up to 58% of the helium (that radioactivity would have generated during the alleged 1.5 billion year age of the granodiorite) was still in the zircons. Yet the zircons were so small that they should not have retained the helium for even a tiny fraction of that time. The high helium retention levels suggested to us and many other creationists that the helium simply had not had enough time to diffuse out of the zircons, and that recent accelerated nuclear decay had produced over a billion years worth of helium within only the last few thousand years, during Creation and/or the Flood. Such acceleration would reduce the radioisotopic time scale from megayears down to months.

However, until a few years ago nobody had done the experimental and theoretical studies necessary to confirm this conclusion quantitatively. There was only one (ambiguously reported) measurement of helium diffusion through zircon (Magomedov, 1970). There were no measurements of helium diffusion through biotite, the black mica surrounding the zircons. In 2000 the RATE project (Humphreys, 2000) began experiments to measure the diffusion rates of helium in zircon and biotite specifically from the Jemez
Granodiorite. The data, reported here, are consistent with data for a mica related to biotite (Lippolt & Weigel, 1988), with recently reported data for zircon (Reiners, Farley, & Hickes, 2002) and with a reasonable interpretation of the earlier zircon data Magomedov, 1970). We show that these data limit the age of these rocks to between 4,000 and 14,000 years. These results support our hypothesis of accelerated nuclear decay and represent strong scientific evidence for the young world of Scripture.

Keywords

Helium, Diffusion, Radioisotopes, Age, Dating, Nuclear Decay, Zircon, Biotite, Accelerated Decay

For Full Text

Please see the Download PDF link above for the entire article.

 

 

The Latest
CREATION.LIVE PODCAST
Beauty for Beauty's Sake! | Creation.Live Podcast: Episode 17
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? Or is beauty an objective standard? Where do our ideas of beauty even come from?   Hosts...

NEWS
Fire Sensory Capabilities of the Venus Flytrap
Fascinating discoveries have been made regarding the amazing Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula).1 For example, all parts of this amazing plant...

CREATION PODCAST
What Really Swallowed Jonah? | The Creation Podcast: Episode...
The book of Jonah contains the historical account of the prophet Jonah. In verse 17 of chapter 1, the text states that the Lord prepared a great...

NEWS
More Flood Evidence
Paleontologists recently discovered the partial fossils of two new species of dinosaur just outside of Casablanca. As stated in a Science Direct article,...

NEWS
New York Times Editorial: Big Bang Unraveling?
Two physicists have suggested in a recent New York Times guest editorial that Big Bang cosmology ‘may be starting to unravel.’1...

NEWS
Your Functional ''Yolk Sac''
For decades, evolutionists pointed to dozens of ‘useless artifacts’ of the human body to make their questionable case for evolution. But...

NEWS
The Beauty of Creation: Created for God’s Own Glory
Have you ever wondered why a sunset on a beach is captivating, snowcapped mountains are breathtaking, and a valley filled with wildflowers is enchanting? Scripture,...

CREATION PODCAST
Devastating, Dangerous, and Deadly Bacteria? | The Creation Podcast:...
Bacteria are everywhere! While we can't see them with the naked eye, these little critters are everywhere, even in and on your body! Some of...

NEWS
Pre-Flood Reptile Fossil Discovered With Baleen
Baleen whales (suborder Mysticeti) are amazing filter-feeding mammals of the sea. They belong to a group called the Cetacea. Evolutionists suggest they...

NEWS
September 2023 ICR Wallpaper
"If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments, and perform them, then I will give you rain in its season, the land shall yield its produce, and...