The following has been taken from the latest Ozreasons (Australian branch of Reasons To Believe) email newsletter at ozreasons.org It really proves just what nonsense Young Earth Creationism is! It must be hindering many from accepting the gospel in the academic world. YEC needs to be jettisoned from Christian apologetics. It is also testimony to the fact that the Bible should not be used the way YEC use it, that is by counting geneologies and adding the creation week on the end and concluding the age of the earth/universe. The Bible never intended this, it has much more important issues to communicate than the age of the earth.
Tree Rings
Dendochronologists can gain an idea of the climate over the last 10,000 years or so by analysing tree rings that are accumulated on a yearly basis. The basic process (though there are some complicating factors) is a matter of counting annual layers revealing the approximate time period that each layer existed. Wet seasons are characterized by wide layers whereas dry seasons typically produce narrower layers. The Shulman Grove area in California are known to possess living trees exceeding 4,500 years old in addition to dead trees preserved by the cold climate that push the chronology back further than 8,000 years. The layers on these specimens were also cross calibrated with carbon 14 dating. The significance is that we have an independent tool to check the accuracy of radiometric dating. This is significant as many Christians have been told that radiometric dating methods are for a multitude of reasons completely unreliable and entirely untestable — clearly false claims. If these criticisms were actually correct, than it is surely an astounding coincidence to say the least that the tree ring chronology correlates with the carbon 14 dating results. We also have additional data derived from European Oak where the chronology can be extended back to 11,000 years.
It is also important to note that climatic information from tree rings of differing species and different locations are giving similar accounts of the Earth's climate over the past 10,000 years. Well known historical events such as massive volcanic eruptions can also be calibrated with the tree ring data. This is because these enormous volcanic eruptions ejected so much material into the atmosphere, a mini “nuclear-winter” existed for a number of years resulting in extremely poor plant growth - including crop failure and mass starvation. The recorded years of these events correspond to extremely thin tree rings for these years.
Ref: Pinus Longaeva D.K. Bailey 1970 http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-on ... ngaeva.htm and
Useful Tree Species for Tree-Ring Dating http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/lorim/good.html
Varve Layers
A varve is a pair of thin layers of sediment that forms in freshwater lakes that tend to freeze over in winter. Typically, one band of the varve is light and composed of sand and organic material (eg pollen) while the second layer is dark and composed of very fine clay particles.
Varves are formed by seasonal variations in sedimentary deposition. The lighter band is laid down during the summer when a greater flow of water from inflowing streams brings coarse, sandy material into the lake. The larger particles settle rather quickly but the tiny clay particles remain in suspension due to the agitation of the lake water caused by the inflowing streams and also by wind. In winter, the lake freezes over and so the effect of the wind is not felt and inflow from streams ceases. Because the water is no longer being agitated, the fine clay particles can slowly settle to the bottom of the lake, right on top of the coarse sand layer. Next summer, when the lake thaws, the cycle begins over. Each varve couplet, therefore, typically represents a single year. One can determine the age of a varve formation by simply counting the number of couplets, just as one can determine the age of a tree by counting its rings.
Varve deposits display great age. The Salido, Castile, and Bell Canyon formations of west Texas contain 260,000 couplets. Hence, this formation is most naturally considered to be 260,000 years old. The famous Green River Shales which span three US states contain about 7.5 million paper-thin couplets.
Dr. H. Kitagawa and his team have established a chronology of varve layers containing diatoms (unicellular algae) in Japan that calibrate the Carbon 14 dating technique back to 45,000 years ago. The spring season layers were recognised by dark coloured clay with white layers due to an increase in diatom growth. Carbon 14 dating (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry was the exact method used) of organic material in the layers has confirmed the accuracy of this dating method to beyond that predicted by most young earth models. It is also important to note that this study revealed similar climate details to European marine sediments of coral dated with Uranium and Thorium methods as well as carbon 14. Their results also were in agreement with the tree ring C-14 results.
Tree-ring data presents a serious problem for young earth/global flood proponents. (Most YECs believe that the large majority, if not all of the earth's geological record was deposited in around 12 months during Noah's flood at no more than 5,000 yrs ago.) Varves must give those YECs familiar with them nightmares. How can a global flood that is incomprehensibly catastrophic and haphazard carefully deposit thousands and in some places even millions of very thin and fragile but perfectly alternating and chemically distinct sedimentary layers in an organised fashion that just coincidently happens to correlate with annual seasonal changes? How did the flood insert fluctuating amounts of diatoms into each layer which amazing just happen to correlate with what we would expect from changes in season? But much more amazingly, how did this global flood manage to sort these trillions of diatoms in the correct layers according to the proportion of carbon-14 within their bodies so that modern scientists would be deceived into thinking the varves represented thousands of years of seasonal freshwater lake.
Ref: H. Kitagawa and J. van der Plicht Atmospheric Radiocarbon Calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: Late Glacial Fluctuations and Cosmogenic Isotope Production 1997
http://www.acad.carleton.edu/curricular ... ration.pdf
Ice Cores in Greenland
There are two ice cores drilled in Greenland called the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP) and the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) both 30 km apart and nearly 3 km deep giving the same paleoenvironmental record back to 110,000 years ago. The ice layers tend to trap tiny bubbles of air, including the impurities that are indicative of volcanic eruptions and other climatic events. An example would be the oxygen isotope ratios of the heavier oxygen-18 to the lighter oxygen-16. As the temperature increases, the heavier isotopes would be more readily precipitated (as part of H2O) than the lighter isotopes and thus the ratio of oxygen isotopes found in air bubbles in the ice provide a signature for past climate changes. Deuterium, also known as Hydrogen-2 is another isotope that provides clues for temperature ranges at each period represented by the respective ice core layers. Studies of CO2 levels in the trapped air bubbles in the ice has enabled scientists to plot the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over recent millennia which is of obvious importance to the earth's increasing Greenhouse Effect.
Increases in acidity are the hall-mark for volcanic eruptions such as the eruption at Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Evidence for this eruption shows up in the Greenland ice core. Historically documented events like Vesuvius serve as independent tools to date the layers of ice. Though the eruption was less than 2000 years ago and thus not long enough to discriminate between young and old earth creation models, it does provide us with great confidence that the ice layers are accurate recorders of time. Hence the layers that precede A.D 79 to a time of 100,000 years ago can be accepted as accurate.
More extensive though less detailed ice cores were those drilled at the Vostok Station, Antarctica to a depth of more than 3.5 km. Placed in the Antarctica region on the opposite side of the globe, affords an excellent position for strategic sampling of past global climatic trends. The project was a joint initiative of Russia, France and the USA. The snowfall record reaches back to 420,000 years ago, yielding data on dust and sea salt levels, aerosols and global levels of methane and carbon dioxide. Climate details such as oxygen isotope abundances correlate nicely with the GISP2 levels. Some of the age measurements from different research groups are as follows:
Six measurements at 1934 m: • 136,758 years (Sowers)
• 141,804 years (Lorius)
• 137,725 years (Jouzel-1)
• 135,018 years (Jouzel-2)
• 140,243 years (Waelbroeck)
• 135,507 years (Petit)
Five measurements at 2082 m: • 164,433 years (Lorius)
• 155,785 years (Jouzel-1)
• 150,957 years (Jouzel-2)
• 152,239 years (Waelbroeck)
• 151,721 years (Petit)
Four measurements at 2757 m: • 261,787 years (Jouzel-1)
• 242,235 years (Jouzel-2)
• 243,004 years (Waelbroeck)
• 237,975 years (Petit)
One measurement at 3310 m: • 422,766 years (Petit)
As if the evidence was not already strong enough to demonstrate the earth is older than 6,000 years, we can collaborate the Milankovitch astronomical cycles with the climate variations that we observe in ice and marine cores. The earth's surface records the processes that astronomers predict from variations in eccentricity (where the orbit deviates from circular) every 100,000 years, obliquity (a slight variation in the Earth's 23.5 degree tilt) every 41,000 years and precession (where the degree of Earth's angular tilt remains the same only the direction of the axial tilt is altered like the wobbling of a spinning top as it slows down) every 23,000 years. These variations manifest in the form of climatic shifts and can be catalogued in the various ice and sedimentary layers layered down on Earth.
Ref:Sigfíºs J. Johnsen The Greenland Ice Core Records 2002 http://www.gsf.fi/esf_holivar/johnsen.pdf
Vostok Ice Core NOAA Paleoclimatology Program 1998 http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/ ... ostok.html and
Vostok Time Scales ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/a ... k_time.txt
Coral Layers
Like the layers of tree rings coral layers vary in density according to seasonal changes. The unique gift they offer to researches is that they not only present us with annual bands but also daily bands. In other words, for every yearly band found we also detect 365 daily bands. This is an indirect way of telling us that the lengths of each day are 24 hours long.
Astronomers have made measurements using atomic clocks on the rate of deceleration of the rotation period of Earth. The results present a deceleration time of 0.000015 sec per day. Although we would have reason to expect fluctuations in this rate we can estimate that at 10 million years ago the length of a day would have been approximately 200 seconds less. Extrapolating from this figure back we would expect the Devonian period (360 — 410 million years ago) to be characterised by days of 21.8 hours in length or 400 days per year.
Ancient coral layers dated to the Devonian era via thorium 230 and protactinium 231 radiometric methods provide an independent test for the astronomical calculations mentioned. The exciting discovery from ancient coral was that daily growth lines counted between the extreme values of 385 and 410 leaving us with an average for that period that correlates very well with the astronomical methods. Coral from the Pennsylvanian (late Carboniferous: 290 — 325 million years ago) era from two different geographical regions gave 390 and 385 lines per annum. These results imply that the lengths of each day have increased as the earth has slowed down over the 100 million years since the Devonian period and provide further collaborative support for uniformitarian processes.
Ref: John Wells Coral Growth and Geochronometry 1963 http://freepages. genealogy.rootsweb.com/~springport/geology/coral_growth.html
New Discovery
The exceptionally thick Antarctic ice have provided researchers with an opportunity to drill a core 3 km deep into Dome C, high on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.[1][2][3] According to the report, the earth has experienced 8 ice ages throughout the last 740,000 years. The study confirmed that the obliquity cycle and the eccentricity cycle that occur every 41,000 and 100,000 years respectively have a major influence on climatic conditions. This study reveals even more headaches for a young earth creation model since the core now reaches further back in time than ever before and receives collaboration from various astronomical cycles. This study also supported evidence from prior research that the last 10,000 years of human history (Holocene period) has been exceptionally benign climatically, providing a unique environment for human civilisation to flourish.
[1]Laurent Augustin, et al., “Eight Glacial Cycles from an Antarctic Ice Core,” Nature 429 (2004), 623-628.
[2] Jerry F. McManus, “A Great Grand-Daddy of Ice Cores,” Nature 429 (2004), 611-612.
[3] Gabrielle Walker, “Frozen Time,” Nature 429 (2004), 596-597.
young earth creationism: Dead in the water?
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Prodigal Son
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i can't concentrate that long (my attention span sucks!). could you summarize?