The Fallacies of Radioactive Dating of Rocks
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v1/n1/radioactive-dating
Flaws in dating the earth as ancient
“W. Compston and R.T. Pidgeon (Nature 321:766–769, 1986) obtained 140 zircon crystals from a single rock unit and subjected them to uranium/uranium concordia (U/U)1 and uranium/thorium concordia (U/Th)2 dating methods. One crystal showed a U/U date of 4.3 billion years, and the authors therefore claimed it to be the oldest rock crystal yet discovered.
A serious problem here is that all 140 crystals from the same rock unit gave statistically valid information about that rock unit.3 No statistician could ever condone a method which selected one value and discarded all the other 139. In fact, the other 139 crystals show such a confusion of information that a statistician could only conclude that no sensible dates could be extracted from the data.”
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i1/earth.asp
More and more wrong dates
“Is this dating failure from Mount St Helens an isolated case of radioisotope dating giving wrong results for rocks of known age? Certainly not! Dalrymple,1 one of the big names in radioactive dating [and a self-confessed intermediate between an atheist and agnostic], lists a number of cases of wrong potassium-argon ages for historic lava flows (Table A). There are many other examples of obviously wrong dates. Only recently, Creation magazine reported that ages up to 3.5 million years were obtained for lava flows that erupted in New Zealand from 1949 to 1975.2”
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v23/i3/dating.asp
“Excess Argon”: The “Achillies’ Heel” of Potassium-Argon and Argon-Argon “Dating” of Volcanic Rocks
http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=436
Radioactive ‘dating’ in conflict!
Fossil wood in ‘ancient’ lava flow yields radiocarbon
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v20/i1/dating.asp
Radio-dating in Rubble
The lava dome at Mount St Helens debunks dating methods
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v23/i3/radiodating.asp
“In June of 1992, Dr Austin collected a 7-kg (15-lb) block of dacite from high on the lava dome. A portion of this sample was crushed and milled into a fine powder. Another piece was crushed and the various mineral crystals were carefully separated out.3 The ‘whole rock’ rock powder and four mineral concentrates were submitted for potassium-argon analysis to Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, MA—a high-quality, professional radioisotope-dating laboratory. The only information provided to the laboratory was that the samples came from dacite and that ‘low argon’ should be expected. The laboratory was not told that the specimen came from the lava dome at Mount St Helens and was only 10 years old.
The results of this analysis are shown in Table 1. What do we see? First and foremost that they are wrong. A correct answer would have been ‘zero argon’ indicating that the sample was too young to date by this method. Instead, the results ranged from 340,000 to 2.8 million years! Why? Obviously, the assumptions were wrong, and this invalidates the ‘dating’ method.”
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The critical assumption of Rate of Decay- and why it matters!
“A Critical Assumption
A critical assumption used in carbon-14 dating has to do with this ratio. It is assumed that the ratio of 14C to 12C in the atmosphere has always been the same as it is today (1 to 1 trillion). If this assumption is true, then the AMS 14C dating method is valid up to about 80,000 years. Beyond this number, the instruments scientists use would not be able to detect enough remaining 14C to be useful in age estimates. This is a critical assumption in the dating process. If this assumption is not true, then the method will give incorrect dates. What could cause this ratio to change? If the production rate of 14C in the atmosphere is not equal to the removal rate (mostly through decay), this ratio will change. In other words, the amount of 14C being produced in the atmosphere must equal the amount being removed to be in a steady state (also called “equilibrium”). If this is not true, the ratio of 14C to 12C is not a constant, which would make knowing the starting amount of 14C in a specimen difficult or impossible to accurately determine.”
Please Note the following admission and subsequent denials of the founder of the carbon-14 dating
“Dr. Willard Libby, the founder of the carbon-14 dating method, assumed this ratio to be constant. His reasoning was based on a belief in evolution, which assumes the earth must be billions of years old. Assumptions in the scientific community are extremely important. If the starting assumption is false, all the calculations based on that assumption might be correct but still give a wrong conclusion.
In Dr. Libby’s original work, he noted that the atmosphere did not appear to be in equilibrium. This was a troubling idea for Dr. Libby since he believed the world was billions of years old and enough time had passed to achieve equilibrium. Dr. Libby’s calculations showed that if the earth started with no 14C in the atmosphere, it would take up to 30,000 years to build up to a steady state (equilibrium).
If the cosmic radiation has remained at its present intensity for 20,000 or 30,000 years, and if the carbon reservoir has not changed appreciably in this time, then there exists at the present time a complete balance between the rate of disintegration of radiocarbon atoms and the rate of assimilation of new radiocarbon atoms for all material in the life-cycle.2
Dr. Libby chose to ignore this discrepancy (nonequilibrium state), and he attributed it to experimental error. However, the discrepancy has turned out to be very real. The ratio of 14C /12C is not constant.
The Specific Production Rate (SPR) of C-14 is known to be 18.8 atoms per gram of total carbon per minute. The Specific Decay Rate (SDR) is known to be only 16.1 disintegrations per gram per minute.3
What does this mean? If it takes about 30,000 years to reach equilibrium and 14C is still out of equilibrium, then maybe the earth is not very old.”
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-disprove-the-bible