Material that could not be verified is recorded here rather than deleted. Rejecting a claim from publication and erasing it from the record are different decisions. Nothing on this page appears in the article.
1. The 175,000-year figure
Claim. "The amount of helium in the atmosphere divided by its formation rate on Earth gives only 175,000 years."
Claimed source. Dave Matson states this as Kent Hovind's young-earth "proof" #14, at https://talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood-yea.html#proof14. The wording above is verbatim from Matson. Hovind's own statement of it was not sought.
Why it is quarantined. The number does not follow from Cook's inputs. Cook 1957 gives 3.5 × 10¹⁵ g of atmospheric ⁴He and a radiogenic production rate of about 3 × 10⁹ g/yr, which divide to 1.17 × 10⁶ years. Adding the cosmic-ray source Cook calls "of comparable magnitude" gives 5.8 × 10⁵ years. Neither is 175,000. Morris's own maximum-age arithmetic in Scientific Creationism p. 151 might settle where 175,000 came from, but it sits in a display equation that the archive.org search-inside endpoint will not return (the retrieved paragraph stops dead at "Consequently the maximum age of the atmosphere, assuming no original helium in the atmosphere, would be"), and the page image at /download/scientificcreati00inst/page/n163_w1600.jpg returns 403 because the item is printdisabled.
What to try next. A paper copy or a borrowable scan of Scientific Creationism, p. 151.
2. Cook 1966's two exponents
Claim. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models (1966), p. 14: an upper limit for the age of the atmosphere of "about 4·10⁵ y" on U/Th production alone, and "1.2·10⁴ y" on Hurley's exudation estimate.
Status. The sentence is verified verbatim; the two exponents are reconstructed, not read. The OCR of a printdisabled archive.org scan destroys superscripts and returns "4-10° y" and "1.2:10° y". The second exponent is fixed independently by Cook's own signed 1986 Discussion ("I gave as my best result 12,000 years"), which is on the record and is what the article cites. The first is fixed only by Cook's own arithmetic on p. 12, where he says Hurley's rate is "30 times more helium than the estimated annual production from decay of U and Th"; dividing 4 × 10⁵ by 30 lands on 12,000, and 4 × 10⁶ does not.
Reviewed again on 30 August 2026, and the first figure is now withheld from the article. A second reading of pp. 11–14 confirms the sentence but not the exponent, and it raises a discrepancy the first pass missed. Cook's own 1957 Nature inputs — 3 × 10⁹ g/yr of radiogenic production against 3.5 × 10¹⁵ g of atmospheric ⁴He — divide to 1.17 × 10⁶ years, not 4 × 10⁵. If the book's balanced-case figure is really 1.2 × 10⁶, then Hurley's thirty-fold higher exudation rate would give about 4 × 10⁴ rather than 1.2 × 10⁴, and the OCR'd pair would be the two figures swapped in magnitude. The 1.2 × 10⁴ is nailed down independently by Cook's 1986 Discussion and is printed; the balanced-case figure is not, and the article now prints "4·10[exponent not recovered] y" in its place. Nothing in the article's argument uses it.
What to try next. A paper copy of Prehistory and Earth Models, p. 14, or a non-printdisabled scan. Two characters settle it.
3. Vardiman 1990, The Age of the Earth's Atmosphere
Claimed content, all at second hand through Malcolm 1994's citations of it: p. 13 on escape velocity as a function of altitude; pp. 19–24 on the Jeans-escape derivation; p. 23 on a characteristic escape time of about 70 million years and on a concession that actual thermal escape is "probably 70–80% of Jeans escape." Malcolm quotes the last as: "Fahr and Shizgal imply that the rate of actual thermal escape is probably 70–80% of Jeans escape, although some calculations have been made that indicate…"
Routes tried. icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Age-of-the-Earths-Atmosphere-Estimated-by-its-Helium-Content.pdf (404); ICR site search (404); archive.org creator:Vardiman (0 hits); DuckDuckGo site:icr.org (blocked, HTTP 202).
Why quarantined. A page-level claim recovered only from another author's citation is not a verified locator. Nothing from the monograph appears in the article.
Updated 30 August 2026. Its full title is now fixed from Vardiman's own 2005 reference list: The Age of the Earth's Atmosphere: A Study of the Helium Flux through the Atmosphere, ICR Technical Monograph, Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, 1990. A further sweep confirms the negative rather than weakening it: archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=publisher:("Institute for Creation Research") returns 48 items, and this is not among them; ICR's own /i/pdf/technical/ directory holds the 1986 conference reprint but no monograph; and ICR's 9,344 books/ URLs are all the Defenders study Bible, so no ICR monograph text is online at all. Routes left: WorldCat interlibrary loan, or the ICR bookstore. This matters more now than it did, because Answers in Genesis' 2013 book chapter footnotes its 1.8-million-year figure to this monograph and to nothing else, and because Vardiman's 2005 withdrawal names it by year.
4. Vardiman, ICR Impact No. 143, "Up, Up and Away! The Helium Escape Problem" (May 1985)
Routes tried. icr.org/article/up-up-away-helium-escape-problem/ (404); icr.org/article/age-earths-atmosphere-estimated-by-its-heli/ (404); the web.archive.org availability API rate-limited (429).
Why it matters. This is the item Matson actually cites when he mentions Vardiman, so a reader tracing the counter-apologetic back to its target lands here rather than on the 1986 conference paper. Nothing is quoted from it.
5. Cook's solar-corona claim
Claim. That ⁴He is arriving at the earth from space by way of the sun's corona, and that this is a significant term in the atmospheric budget.
Claimed source. Morris, Scientific Creationism p. 151, reporting Cook: "On the contrary, Cook has shown there is a strong probability that Helium 4 is actually entering the atmosphere from outer space, by means of the sun's corona." Morris's sentence is verified; Cook's underlying argument is not. It lies past the first paragraph of the 1957 Nature letter, which is the only part served free, and the remainder is paywalled.
Why quarantined. The article does not use the claim, and no number for a coronal helium influx was found in any obtainable source. It also cuts against the young-earth case if true, since an extra source term shortens the computed residence time further.
6. Dalrymple 1984, pages 112 and 113
Status. The block quotation the article prints is verified as Matson's rendering, read directly off the TalkOrigins page. The attribution to pages 112 and 113 of Evolutionists Confront Creationists (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting, Pacific Division AAAS, 1984) is not verified against the printed volume, which was not located.
Ruled out as a substitute. Dalrymple's 1991 Stanford book The Age of the Earth (archive.org ageofearth00unse) was searched with bin/iapdsearch.py; every "helium" hit is Big Bang nucleosynthesis, Rutherford's helium/uranium dating, or stellar burning. It does not treat atmospheric helium. Do not look there again.
7. Axford 1968 and Banks & Holzer 1968
Status. NOT OBTAINED as bytes. Wiley pdfdirect 403; Wiley epdf via bin/cdp-fetch.py 403; NASA ADS articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1968JGR....73.6855A returns S3 AccessDenied and 504s; ADS nph-iarticle_query 404; the NTRS record 19690033251 exists with no attached PDF; and the November 1968 JGR issue printed no abstract for either paper.
What is used instead. Only figures reported by Kashyap 2009 and by Vardiman 1986, each labelled as second-hand in the article's footnotes. No sentence of either paper is quoted anywhere.
8. Charge exchange, the second non-thermal channel
Status. M. R. Torr, D. G. Torr and colleagues from 1974 onward, and "Helium escape from the Earth's atmosphere: the charge exchange mechanism revisited," Planetary and Space Science (1992). Both paywalled at Elsevier, not pursued past the landing page. The article names the mechanism, because Chamberlain names it, and claims no number for it.
9. Clarke, Beg & Craig 1969
Status. NOT OBTAINED; paywalled at Elsevier. DOI verified against Crossref as 10.1016/0012-821X(69)90093-4, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 6:213–220 (June 1969). The article cites its existence and its finding as reported by Vardiman and by Kashyap, and quotes nothing from it.
10. Ken Smith, "Where is the earth's radiogenic helium"
In Bridgstock & Smith (eds.), Creationism: An Australian Perspective (Australian Skeptics, 1986), pp. 20–21. This is the critique Malcolm 1994 is answering. Not attempted. Malcolm's characterisation of it is therefore uncorroborated, and the article does not repeat any of it.