A matter of argumentation, or did you miss that in being hypertechnical and overly focused? I thought it obvious what I was getting at was quite simple and straight forward. Liquefaction studies are fairly new in regard to how serious they are taken. Just as the effect of Water saturation on volcanic domes is a fairly recent thing for them to get worked up about. Go back and look at early geology at the time these theories of strata dating methods were coming about and see how much discussion you can find on liquefaction. Truth is that Global catastrophies are only considered *if* there is no linkage to Christianity. The Scientific community by and large utterly rejects a Global flood and will not entertain discussion of the notion without dismissiveness as though it were some quack theory. That is what we call Bias. Though all the signs be there right under their noses. If it were a burned house we were examining, by comparison, Scientists would look for every other concieveable notion that might destroy a structure before relenting to the notion that wood being charred meant that there had been a fire. Geologists don't pay it much heed with regard to old strata.
We were talking tertiary and quaternary strata here. Do try to keep up. Pleistocene and late quaternary deposits aren't ancient, and largely they aren't 'rock' either. They still show stratigraphy that can be integrated into a self-consistitent and logical picture of the last 10 million years or so, on the great plains.
In terms of this argument and time in general, that is ancient. And I'd argue that your 10 million years figure is arbitrary. You might as well say 20. It lends no proof to what you say. Strata is strata. It might make for interesting conversation; but, the idea that depth or placement relative to depth elsewhere means age is ludicrous unless you can prove continuity and absence of natural meddling or contamination. You can do none of these things. And furthermore, you can't fix any accurate dating. The only reason an Ancient earth is argued for is that it gives evolution time to play about and stack up happenstances one after another for which the odds against any one of them ever occuring is astronomical. to say nothing of the odds of all of it happening. The earth neither has to be very old or very young. It merely has to be what science can prove. And unfortunately, science has been more about creating theories based on bits and pieces rather than identifying facts and following where they lead. One is a waste of time and the other is good investigative technique. You don't go about solving a murder by stating that "the butler did it" then hypothesizing endlessly about the ways in which it might have happened. You do so by looking at the facts and admitting the wife did it, when the evidence leads you there, even if you suspect the butler. Science won't consider anything but the butler and won't follow where the evidence leads. If evolutionists were cops, you'd all be fired for lack of getting anything done and probably sued by the butler for impropriety.
You probably don't believe in plate tectonics either, though. Presumably earthquakes and volcanoes are acts of God, eh?
One doesn't need plates or plate tectonics to have earthquakes or volcanoes either one. I'm sure that statement bothers you; but, then you're being argumentative, so why shouldn't I. Volcanoes happen because a fisure in the strata exposes a path of least resistance through which magma flows upword as a relief of pressure off the core. Magma forms a mound that, over time, destablizes and together with saturation principles causes a restriction to the flow that has been enjoyed up to the point of criticality. Eruptions then occur. And tectonics have neither a place in the process nor is the notion even required for the process to happen. Quakes need only a fault in the strata combined with ground level saturation in order to happen. If plate tectonics were a reality, then why the striations on the ocean floor parallel to continental drift vectors? Right, they just appeared from no where or were formed by slow moving mud flows.. And I'm King of france.
You think there are no signs of eroded mountains in South Dakota and Montana? Have you ever been to either state?
And the pattern continues. Respond to something I haven't said as though astounded that I'd utter such a thing. Be astounded. I didn't utter it. Read.
We use carbon dating to get ages for dinosaurs. Sure.
No kidding.
We can't date back a significant way into the Pleistocene with 14C dating. However, Pleistocene deposits are recent, near the surface, and we can easily extend what we know about the present and the recent past back to the Pleistocene.
So you say anyhow. Wait, see that, the world just stopped in anticipation of hearing how this is accomplished - actual proof for dating..
I can look at 9 million year old ash layers,
No, you can look at ash layers and theorize that they're 9 million years old. What you can prove is quite another thing or we would'nt keep running around in circles while you cite specific dates with nothing to back them up other than an underlying hypothesis.
That's what science is; technical, and very, very focussed. What creationists. Velikoskians, and other miscellaneous 'alternative science' types misunderstand most about science is their apparent conviction that you can somehow argue away evolution, or other scientific ideas you don't like. You can't, because debate plays a very small role in science. 99% what we do is experiment and data collection, and after that, most of the time, res ipsa loquitur . My objections to these alternative theories are not, in general, broad-bush metaphysics. They're the myriad of details that compose our present scientific understanding of the world that alternative theories at best fail to account for and at worst completely contradict.
Where there's a genuine controversy, as say currently there is in the evolution of birds, it's solved not by polemic, but by collecting more data. For various reasons I was a proponent in the minority view (as an enthusiastic amateur, not a researcher) that birds did not descend from dinosaurs. What has changed my mind is not the arguments of Feduccia on the one hand or Ostrom on the other, but the recent fossil discoveries in China.
An objection to an existing theory carries with it a responsibility to be totally familiar with the existing body of data, and a willingness to collect new data which may resolve the controversy. In general, this can't be done in front of a computer terminal.
Scientific revolutionaries, like Einstein, for example, were able to accomplish their work largely because they were great physicists who knew the existing theories and experimental results and were able to reconcile their new ideas with what was already known. Very few creationists, in my experience, know a substantial amount of descriptive biology or geology; and without that, current ideas about the age of the earth or the lineage of its current life cannot be overturned. (And I'd argue that if you knew the observational work, you wouldn't be creationists or whatever anyway).