One Last Time—Radiocarbon Dating is Inaccurate – Part IV

The amount of evidence and scientists opposed to the accuracy of Carbon-14 dating is remarkable. The list seems endless. Consider that science cannot date things that are too old. After about 10 half lifes, there is very little Carbon-14 left to measure. They can't date oil paints because they utilize old petroleum, nor can they date fossils because they often contain preservatives. Normally, one would think fossils cannot be dated because they would be too old (older than about 100,000 years), however, carbon does exist in fossils that could be dated, and sometimes is, showing the fossils are not as old as claimed.

Fossils are the remains, imprints, or traces of prehistoric organism

The same is true with coal. With the new atomic accelerator technique that has consistently detected the least small amounts of Carbon-14 in every organic specimen—even in materials claimed to be millions of years old, like coal. If specimen were really millions of years old, virtually no Carbon-14 would remain in them to be measured.

It is interesting to note that Dr. Willard F. Libby, the creator of the C-14 Time Clock, was shocked when he found that radio carbon dates for human artifacts extended back only 5000 years, and that older dates were found to be unreliable. In addition, Carbon-14 dating stands or falls on the assumption that the rate of radioactive decay is a constant—yet in a June 1964 Time Magazine article (p74) it was stated that a group of physicists reported they had proved they could influence the rate of radioactive decay. Further, still, some geologists, as reported by Henry Faul, question the use of the C14 method for samples stored under moist conditions. This is a most serious limitation, for who can be sure that moisture has never come into contact with a given sample, especially one buried in the earth.

More trouble appeared in a December 1972 Reader’s Digest article (pp86-90) with studies of bristlecone pine borings with trees considered to be the oldest living matter known on earth. Carbon-14 tests showed errors of a few centuries up to a thousand years, casting further doubt on the measurement method.

Not far from Assur the Tigris meets the Lower Zab. Along its upper reaches and near its source are Jarmo and Hasanlu at Lake Urmia. Jarmo may be as old as Jericho in the Levant; its peak seems to be between 6,200 and 5,800 BC. Houses, with adobe walls and sun-dried mud roofs, were found with stone foundations

Another classic Carbon-14 problem was reported by A. Custance in Fossil Remains of Early Man (1968) showing the testing of the prehistoric village of Jarmo, across the Tigris River north of Baghdad in northern Iraq—eleven samples of mortar, which absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, were dated from the various strata and showed a 6000-year spread from oldest to most recent, though an analysis of all the archaeological evidence showed that the village was occupied no more than 500 years before it was finally abandoned. On the other hand, mortar tests from Oxford Castle in England gave an age of 7,270 years, though the castle was built only about 800 years ago.

Carbon-14 analysis of oil from Gulf of Mexico deposits showed an age measured in thousands of years—not the millions believed. Data produced by the Petroleum Institute at Victoria, New Zealand, showed that petroleum deposits were formed 6,000-7,000 years ago, though textbooks state that petroleum formation took place about 300,000,000 years ago. Fossil wood was found in an iron mine in Shefferville, Ontario, Canada, that was a Precambrian deposit. Later the wood was described as coming from Late Cretaceous rubble, which made it about 100 million years old instead of more than 600 million years old—however, two independent Carbon-14 tests showed an age of about 4000 years.

Abandoned open pit iron mind in Schefferville, where the wood was found to be 4000 years old, not six million as first tested

Regarding the vaunted ages of human ruins, Dr. Willard Libby, when looking for a variety of older dates to use as controls for his carbon dating, discovered that all those archeological sites he’d read about dating back 20,000 years and more were not historically verifiable. He said, “You read statements in books that such and such a society or archeological site is 20,000 years old. We learned rather abruptly that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known accurately; in fact, it is about the time of the First Dynasty in Egypt that the first historical date of any real certainty has been established.” In other words, all verifiable human history disappears around 3000 BC.—a date very close to Noah’s Flood. Then there are these three problems:

Lava flows: Certain lava flows on the island of Hawaii are very similar to each other and related to each other, which indicates that they were expelled within a 3 to 6 month time frame to each other. The reason for that short time frame is suggested by the fact that in the process of lava extrusion, the magma chamber becomes depleted in various elements. This, in turn, causes changes in the makeup of lava flows over time. Therefore, when very similar lava compositions are found, this suggests very short periods between extrusions. However, radiometric dates show millions of years between these lava flows, thus the results of chemical composition and radiometric dates do not match. This is not understandable unless the ages are not correct.

Cosmic rays: It appears that cosmic ray penetration into our atmosphere depends upon the strength of the earth's magnetic field. The rock record indicates that the magnetic field has varied in both strength and direction over time. This has serious implications on Carbon-14 and Carbon-12 chemistry in the upper atmosphere. However, over the years there appears to be a steady weakening of the magnetic field. As J. Roach is quoted in the National Geographic, “Earths magnetic field is fading. Today it is about 10 % weaker than it was when German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss started keeping tabs on it in 1845. “This would mean the production of Carbon-14 was less in the past than is assumed by the carbon-14 dating method, and would lead to dating objects much older than they really are. 

It is claimed that rocks collected from the Moon have been measured by radiometric dating techniques. Among the best-known techniques are radiocarbon dating, potassium-argon dating and uranium-lead dating. The basic equation of radiometric dating requires that neither the parent nuclide nor the daughter product can enter or leave the material after its formation. There is no possible way that could be known on the moon! Let alone known over a period of billions of years, yet the moon rocks have been dated to a range in age from about 3.16 billion years old for the basaltic samples derived from the lunar maria, to about 4.5 billion years old for rocks derived from the highlands
It doesn’t take much to realize there is a hidden agenda at play here. Look at the results of the age of moon rocks reported in the press. The results are not as clear cut as it appears. Other methods, for example, uranium-lead and thorium-lead ages, have been found to result in contradictory evidence. A classic example is that the dust samples on the surface of the moon seem to be older than the rocks underneath. In addition, dates acceptable to preconceived theory have been generally published. Much less is said about unacceptable dates of moon rocks found by means of potassium-argon dating, all the way from 7 to 20 billion years in age. Rather than question the method and the assumptions underlying the method, the bad samples are regarded as 'contaminated' and discarded. The approach is, if they believe a date of one million years would be accurate, and the test shows ten thousand years, the specimen must be contaminated and the date not used. At worst, there is a conspiracy involved, at best, scientists are so taken with their own theories and beliefs that nothing short of that is acceptable and must be wrong. In fact, a geophysical research journal reported that lava which formed in the year 1800-1801 was tested by the potassium-argon dating method and showed an age of 160 million up to 3 billion years in age. Other reports have been published of similar dates for young rocks in Norway, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union (Journal of Geophysical Research, July, 1968).

Dr. Robert V. Gentry, the world's leading authority on radiohalo research, who has been published in Nature, Science, and Annual Review of Nuclear Science, has stated in Research Communications Network Report, February 1977 (p3) regarding radiometric dating: “Earth's primordial crustal rocks, rather than cooling and solidifying over millions or billions of years, crystallized almost instantaneously. Some geological formations thought to be 100 million years old are in reality only several thousand years old.”

(See the next post, “One Last Time—Radiocarbon Dating is Inaccurate – Part V,” for more on the subject of problems with radiocarbon dating)