Nice link! The above quote is another way of saying, "Noise floor from contamination."
We ain't talking a "little noise"
From article (again); there still remained a significant level of 14C—typically about 100 times the ultimate sensitivity of the instrument—in samples that should have been utterly "14C-dead," including many from the deeper levels of the fossil-bearing part of the geological record.2
Meteor That Killed the Dinosaurs – Didn’t 09/25/2003
According to Gerta Keller (Princeton), the meteor that formed the Chicxulub Crater in the Yucatan was not responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. It was smaller than previously believed, and came 300,000 years too early. According to her research, that impact does not coincide with the K-T boundary, and it was too small to kill even small organisms like foraminifera. She thinks worldwide volcanism and a series of impacts did the job.
“These views have not made Keller a popular figure at meteorite impact meetings,” says EurekAlert. But the idea that a single impact caused a worldwide mass extinction 65 million years ago has been taking a beating by more and more very renowned scientists, the article claims. More detail can be found at the Princeton Weekly Bulletin.
This makes the final episode of Walking With Dinosaurs obsolete. Wonder what the BBC animators think? It was a fun story, while it lasted.Radiocarbon Found in Ancient Coal 09/25/2003
The article claims that foraminifera evolve rapidly through geologic times and “constitute a timeline by which surrounding geologic features can be dated.” They would know better if they had read our Sept 22 headline.
Critics will undoubtedly complain that these creationists have an ulterior motive for questioning the old age of the earth, but doesn’t that criticism cut both ways? Are the motives of Darwinians pure as the wind-driven snow? Can we brush aside the motive-bashing and look at the facts? It’s the quality of the research that matters.
These scientists, each with PhDs from recognized institutions, took samples from the U.S. Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank maintained at Pennsylvania State University. They had the samples radiocarbon dated at “one of the foremost AMS laboratories in the world.” It was the laboratory, not ICR, that returned the measurements that carbon-14 was still ticking in the samples. Further, the ICR scientists are not the only ones who have found this to be the case. Baumgardner states that this is a well-known anomaly among geophysicists:Routinely finding 14C/12C ratios on the order of 0.1-0.5% of the modern value—a hundred times or more above the AMS detection threshold—in samples supposedly tens to hundreds of millions of years old is therefore a huge anomaly for the uniformitarian framework.Unless evolutionists can come up with an explanation for how carbon-14 got into so many samples from so many locations, that all show similar amounts despite their position in the geologic column, the clear implications are: (1) the samples are not as old as claimed, and (2) the geologic periods, assumed to be successive, were more or less contemporaneous.
This earnest effort to understand this “contamination problem” therefore generated scores of peer-reviewed papers in the standard radiocarbon literature during the last 20 years. Most of these papers acknowledge that most of the 14 in the samples studied appear to be intrinsic to the samples themselves, and they usually offer no explanation for its origin. The reality of significant levels of 14C in a wide variety of fossil sources from throughout the geological record has thus been established in the secular scientific literature by scientists who assume the standard geological time scale is valid and have no special desire for this result!
Dr. Baumgardner’s report is one of eight presented at the Fifth International Conference on Creationism in August by the ICR team named RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth). The other seven papers presented additional evidences that call evolutionary long ages into question. For a summary of these, see: ICR Acts and Facts #364, October 2003.
For an example of anomalous radiocarbon dates in the secular literature, see: Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences Vol 29 (May 2001), pp. 256-294, posted online 04/22/2003. It shows that dating of modern deltas by radiocarbon yields mostly unexpected results. How much more coal beds that are assumed to be millions of years old? A glimpse of articles discussing anomalous radiocarbon dates in a cursory Internet search shows that evolutionists have a few just-so stories available for explaining them: shellfish that exclude or ingest carbon-14 from their shells, etc. (see, for example, Quaternary Chronology and Dating by James S. Aber). But none of these appear valid for coal beds, which should have no radiocarbon at all if they were many millions of years old, as evolutionary geology assumes them to be. Again, we see that evolutionists can be very creative in their storytelling. It’s not that they are unable to concoct a story to fit the data, but that the data require a story to fit a belief. The dates were not expected nor predicted. Sometimes they can be made to fit in the hands of a skilled masseur. Other times, they chalk them up as a mystery and leave it for future workers to figure out, never questioning their assumptions.
When various dating methods yield old and young ages, which results should be preferred? Results in the millions and billions of years require extrapolating rates that have only been measured for a hundred years by many orders of magnitude, and assuming no processes have intervened for vast periods of time not open to human observation. Young-age results, therefore have a much better observation to assumption ratio. Regardless of the implications, reason and scientific caution advise that we take a conservative approach, and place more credence in the methods that yield young ages. The Darwin Party will scream “but we need more time!” Sorry.