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
NEWS
New Fossil Discovery Upends Animal Evolution...Again
Reptiles belong to a group of animals called amniotes that also include birds and mammals. A new Australian fossil discovery of a clawed amniote demonstrates...

NEWS
100% Cicada Fossil
Cicadas are an unusual-looking insect belonging to the order Hemiptera (the true bugs, including bed bugs and aphids). If you live in the eastern United...

CREATION PODCAST
Earth’s Origins: Science, Theology, and a New Geology Textbook...
Since the late eighteenth century, most scientists have argued for a uniformitarian view of Earth’s history. They claim the world...

NEWS
June 2025 ICR Wallpaper
"He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from...

CREATION.LIVE PODCAST
Getting the Gospel into People's Hands | Creation.Live Podcast:...
Can God use an atheist airline pilot to reach other nations with the truth of the Gospel? The answer, obviously, is yes.   Host...

NEWS
Chimp Genome Markedly Different from Human
An oft-repeated claim of evolutionary propaganda is that chimpanzee and human DNA are 98.5% identical. This high level of DNA similarity, which has...

NEWS
''73-Million-Year-Old'' Alaskan Salmon
Fish evolution remains an enigma. Evolutionists can only say fish first “appeared” over a half-billion years ago.1 Creationists...

NEWS
God's Memorial Day
“And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of...

NEWS
The Origin of Eukaryotes
Eukaryotes are multicellular organisms that contain diverse differentiated cell types. Within almost every cell there are subcellular compartments called...

CREATION PODCAST
Water vs. Wind: The Controversial Coconino | The Creation Podcast:...
Welcome to the sixth episode in a series called “The Failures of Old Earth Creationism.” Many Christians attempt to fit old...