Geochemical Clocks

Seven clocks that divide an inventory by a rate, each only as good as its reservoir's closure. Ocean salt and air helium give young-earth maxima of millions of years on their own authors' arithmetic. Argon is the hardest old-earth number examined. The four recent-past methods fail by measured, explained amounts, not by the growing factors a young earth needs.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"For several years before the magnitude of the polar wind was determined Vardiman (1990) reported that the lack of helium in the atmosphere argued for a young earth.  That argument is no longer valid based on the measured and computed escape rate of helium to space in the polar wind." — Larry Vardiman withdrawing his own argument, at ICR, 20051

"If creationism is true, radiometric dates are wrong, but the fact that they are wrong in the same direction (all too old) must be explained for a critique to be complete." — Kurt Wise, First International Conference on Creationism, 19862

Summary

The seven articles in this section test clocks that work by accumulation rather than by counting layers.  Something builds up in a reservoir:  salt in the sea, helium and argon in the air, flipped amino acids in a shell, stored radiation in a sand grain, cosmic-ray atoms in quartz, thorium in a coral.  Divide the amount by the rate it builds up and the answer is a time.  Every one of these clocks stands or falls on two things:  whether the reservoir stayed closed, so that nothing leaked in or out unseen, and whether the rate is known.

The seven split into three groups, and the split matters more than any single number.  Two are young-earth clocks, and both give maximum ages of millions of years on their own authors' arithmetic.  One was offered as a young-earth argument and turned out to be the strongest old-earth number this project has assessed.  Four are mainstream methods for the recent geological past, from a few centuries to a few million years, each with documented failures that its own practitioners published.

  1. Ocean salinity. Steven Austin and Russell Humphreys' 1990 sodium budget sets an upper limit of 62 million years, and its arithmetic reproduces exactly. It fails on its inputs, and the measured record of ancient seawater shows sodium rising and falling rather than accumulating. Read it.
  2. Atmospheric helium. The air's helium budget really does not balance, and the usual rebuttal overstates closure by three to seven times. But Larry Vardiman's own equation gives 1.76 million years, his 10,000-year figure rests on assuming the helium was created in place, and the isotope ratio rules that out. Two young-earth authors retired the argument in print, in 1998 and 2005. Read it.
  3. Atmospheric argon. The air holds 1.649 × 10¹⁸ moles of argon-40, essentially all of it from potassium decay. Six thousand years at the measured degassing rate supplies one part in 2.5 million of it. The young-earth claim of a hundredfold argon excess is a miscopying of Melvin Cook's 1966 book. Read it.
  4. Amino acid racemization. A chemical clock with no decay in it, set by temperature and by its calibration sample. Its founder's Californian ages were nine to nineteen times too old, and he published the post-mortem himself. The young-age recalibrations fail. The chemistry's ceiling on protein survival, set against reported dinosaur soft tissue, is the strongest young-earth material in the section. Read it.
  5. Luminescence dating. A dosimeter, not a parent-daughter clock, zeroed by sunlight at burial. Its documented over-estimates run up to a factor of twelve, all from grains that were never bleached, and the field caught every one. The young-earth position on it is weak, though one of the article's supports needs correcting, as Part 10 shows. Read it.
  6. Cosmogenic nuclide dating. Two clocks in one. Exposure ages divide by a production rate and are genuinely exposed to a higher past cosmic-ray flux. Burial ages contain no production rate, and the young-earth literature has no answer to them. Read it.
  7. Uranium-series dating. The method's internal checks cannot detect a uniform speed-up of all decay constants, and the article says so. What they can detect is a non-uniform one, and measured δ²³⁴U holds uranium-238 and uranium-234 to the same scaling within 0.015 per cent. Read it.

Two findings cut across the children.  First, every young reading of the four recent-past methods needs an error that grows with the published age:  roughly the published age divided by the 4,500 or so years since the Flood.  That is 7 for a Barbados coral that Bard and colleagues date to 30,470 years, 143 for the 641,300-year cave record of Cheng and colleagues, and 241 to 373 for the burial ratios Michael Oard himself concedes.  The documented failures are a factor of 1.5 to about 19 on particular samples, with named causes.  Second, the young-earth literature does not agree on when decay was accelerated.  RATE puts no episode after the Flood, and Nathan Mogk argues for a single pulse in the Flood year.  Michael Oard puts acceleration through the Ice Age, and Andrew Snelling "during and soon after the flood."3  The luminescence and uranium-series articles disagree about this, and Part 10 settles it from the sources.

Verdict.  None of the seven clocks gives a young earth, and the two built to do so do not do it even on their authors' own numbers.  The strongest young-earth points are real and narrow:  the unbalanced helium and sodium budgets, the calibration dependence of exposure and racemization ages, the protein-survival ceiling, and the fact that uniform accelerated decay is invisible to uranium-series self-checks.  None of them reaches a young age.  What would reach one is a post-Flood history of decay rates that compresses luminescence, uranium-series and burial ages together, uniformly across nuclides, and nobody on either side has published one.

Part 1: Ocean salinity

The Sea's Missing Salt tests the sodium budget that Steven Austin and Russell Humphreys published in 1990, which puts a ceiling of 62 million years on the ocean.  They called it an upper limit, not an age, and said it "leaves room for the possibility that the sea is less than 10,000 years old."4  Every result in the paper reproduces from its own two tables, so the dispute is about inputs, not algebra.  Two inputs carry it.  The groundwater term rests on a stipulated sodium concentration, and deleting it moves the ceiling to 109 million years.  Published estimates of the mid-ocean-ridge sodium sink span a factor of forty, and at the top of that range there is no ceiling at all.  A quarter of the input comes from a table whose own authors say its magnitudes are "too high by a factor of at least 2."5  The measured record runs the wrong way for a filling sea:  fluid inclusions in ancient halite show sodium high in the Permian, low in the Cretaceous and high again today,6 and the world's rock salt holds two to three times the sodium Austin and Humphreys were told.7  The article grades the standard rebuttal by the same standard and finds it compares the wrong columns.  Verdict:  the arithmetic is sound and the conclusion does not follow.  The ocean is not in steady state, and the mainstream answer is a sea whose salinity has moved up and down.

Part 2: Atmospheric helium

Helium in the Atmosphere and the Age of the Earth starts by granting the anomaly.  Crustal decay supplies about 2 × 10⁶ helium-4 atoms per square centimetre per second, the air holds about 5.6 × 10³⁸ of them, and thermal escape removes about 3 per cent of what balance would need.  The best modern estimate of escape by the polar wind is 0.57 of the source,8 so the counter-apologetic claim that the budget balances is three to seven times too generous.  But Larry Vardiman's own equation, in the strongest published form of the argument, gives 1.76 million years.9  His 10,000-year figure comes from assuming the air was created with its helium already in it, which makes the helium an initial condition rather than a clock.  That assumption is testable:  the air's ³He/⁴He ratio requires 88 to 99.7 per cent of its helium-4 to be crustal, where the created-helium model allows under 1 per cent.  R. H. Brown repudiated the argument with arithmetic in Origins in 1998,10 and Vardiman withdrew it at ICR in 2005.1  Verdict:  the budget is genuinely open by a factor of about two, and the young-earth conclusion never followed from it.

Part 3: Atmospheric argon

Atmospheric Argon-40 and the Total Radiogenic Decay Budget is the one clock here that was offered as a young-earth argument and became the strongest old-earth number in the section.  The air holds 1.649 × 10¹⁸ moles of argon-40, and solar-wind argon caught by the Genesis spacecraft shows that at most 0.00015 per cent of it can be primordial.11  Michael Bender and colleagues measured the present degassing rate from air trapped in Antarctic ice at 1.1 × 10⁸ moles a year.12  Six thousand years of that supplies one part in 2.5 million of the inventory, by a route that needs no estimate of the earth's potassium.  Harold Slusher's claim that the air holds about a hundred times more argon than decay could make13 traces to Melvin Cook's 1966 book, where the hundredfold figure is about potassium and Cook's own budget shows a shortfall of 4.4.14  Accelerated decay would make argon fast, but it would not move it out of feldspar and through the crust, and moving it in a year contradicts the retention premise of RATE's helium-in-zircon argument.  Verdict:  the inventory runs against a young earth, and no young-earth publication has said where the argon came from or how it got out of the rock.

Part 4: Amino acid racemization

Amino Acid Racemization is a chemical clock, so accelerated decay has nothing to act on.  After death, left-handed amino acids slowly flip to the right-handed form, and the rate roughly doubles every 3 °C, which makes the assumed burial temperature and the calibration sample carry the whole result.  Jeffrey Bada's racemization ages of 48,000 years for the Del Mar skeleton and 70,000 for Sunnyvale came back from accelerator radiocarbon at about 5,000 years for both,15 and Bada published the explanation himself:  "An erroneously dated calibration sample will obviously yield erroneous racemization dates."16  Kirsty Penkman's group later rebuilt the method on the protein sealed inside shell crystals, and its ranking of 74 British sites matches four independent orderings, though the authors do not convert it to years.17  The young-age arguments fail:  Larry Helmick's 1976 kink is a feature of the reversible rate law itself, R. H. Brown's 1985 falling rate constant is smaller than the artefact a saturating ratio produces, and Royal Truman's recalibration borrows a rate constant measured at 49.5 °C.  The same chemistry sets a ceiling on protein survival, and a 2016 mainstream paper concedes that reported dinosaur soft tissue "seems to be inconsistent with the observed levels of hydrolysis, dehydration and racemization."18  Verdict:  re-dating fossils young from racemization fails, and the survival ceiling is the strongest young-earth material in this section.

Part 5: Luminescence dating

Luminescence Dating measures when a grain of sand last saw daylight.  The age is the radiation dose stored in the grain divided by the dose rate of the sediment around it, and both are measured on the sample, so it is a dosimeter rather than a parent-daughter clock.  The young-earth objections about a starting inventory and daughter contamination therefore have nothing to act on, and only the constant-rate objection applies.  The documented failures are real and large:  Jinmium was published at 116 to 176 thousand years and corrected to under 10 thousand,19 and in 2016 Kristina Thomsen's group showed that the standard single-grain procedure, applied blind, would have underestimated four radiocarbon-controlled ages by more than 40 per cent.20  The overestimates all come from grains that were never bleached, and the field found every one itself.  The article answers five young-earth authors one by one, among them Larry DeWerd, whose 2020 uncertainty of 85.44 per cent on a 20,000-year age gives 2,912 to 37,088 years rather than the 2,900 to 10,000 he prints.21  Verdict:  on luminescence the young-earth position is weak.  One of the article's supporting claims, that no young-earth author places accelerated decay after the Flood, is wrong, and Part 10 shows what that changes.

Part 6: Cosmogenic nuclide dating

Cosmogenic Nuclide Dating is two clocks that fail in opposite ways.  An exposure age is the count of cosmic-ray-made atoms divided by their production rate, so a higher past flux shrinks it in exact proportion.  The field's own hold-out test misses independently dated ages by 7.1 to 27.1 per cent, depending on the nuclide.22  A burial age reads the decay of aluminium-26 against beryllium-10, and no production rate appears in it, so no change in past flux moves it.  Michael Oard's 2021 CRSQ paper is right about the calibration problem, but the flux history it derives is the published ages divided by the durations he assigns, and the burial ratios of three to four that he concedes need both decay constants 241 to 373 times faster after the Flood.23  Four tills in Missouri give burial ages in the order they are stacked.  The bottom one is reversely magnetised and the three above it normally magnetised, on either side of the field reversal that Balco and Rovey place at 0.78 million years, and the burial ages agree with both the stacking and the magnetism within their errors.24  Verdict:  the young-earth criticism of exposure dating is real and partly correct, and it has no answer to burial dating.

Part 7: Uranium-series dating

Uranium-Series Dating of Corals and Speleothems makes a concession most critics of young-earth arguments miss.  Multiply every decay constant by the same factor and every internal check of the method still passes, including agreement between the thorium-230 and protactinium-231 clocks in the same crystal.  The checks against outside clocks are real:  thorium ages agree with tree rings at the young end and with Greenland's counted ice layers to within 800 years over 60,000.25  The failures are published too, including IntCal20's removal of every coral older than 25,000 calendar years.26  What bites is a measurement.  Four carbonates from three continents that sit at secular equilibrium all read δ²³⁴U between −0.05 and +0.09 per mil,27 which holds the ²³⁸U and ²³⁴U decay constants to the same scaling within 0.015 per cent, where a barrier-changing mechanism big enough to matter would drive them apart by a factor of 9.53.  Post-Flood carbonates need speed-ups from 7 to 851 depending on the record, and RATE's model places no acceleration after the Flood.  Verdict:  whatever happened to decay rates happened to five alpha emitters in lockstep, and no published young-earth mechanism can do that.

Part 8: The seven clocks side by side

Each row states the readings as the child article states them.  Every age in it is the named source's figure.

Clock What it measures Young-earth reading Mainstream reading Depends on What it can test The child's verdict
Ocean sodium Sodium in the sea divided by its net yearly gain Austin and Humphreys 1990: under 62 million years, an upper limit The sea is not in steady state; sodium rose and fell (Lowenstein 2001), and salinity fell from the low 50s per mil in the Early Cambrian to 34.7 today (Hay 2006) The groundwater input, the ridge sink, and sinks that track the sea's sodium content A ceiling only, never an age Arithmetic sound; fails on its inputs
Air helium-4 Helium in the air divided by the flux out of the crust Vardiman 1986: 1.76 million years by his own equation; 10,000 years only if the helium was created in place Polar-wind escape is 0.57 of the source (Kashyap 2009); the leftover imbalance fills the air in 6.6 million years Both fluxes are modelled; the air's starting helium Residence times of 1.7 to 3.9 million years The anomaly is real; the conclusion never followed, and its own authors retired it
Air argon-40 Argon-40 in the air against its measured degassing rate Slusher 1973 and 1981: about 100 times more argon than decay can make The air holds about 47 per cent of 4.5 billion years' production at 240 ppm potassium (Bender 2008) The earth's potassium, 150 to 280 ppm, on the model route only The whole earth's decay budget The strongest old-earth number this project has assessed
Amino acid racemization How far left-handed amino acids have flipped, at a rate set by temperature Gish 1975: unreliable; Helmick 1976, Brown 1985 and Truman: younger ages; survival limits on protein Bada's Californian ages were 9 to 19 times too old from a bad calibration; Penkman's intracrystalline ranking works Burial temperature, where 2 °C is 63 per cent of the age; the calibration sample; a closed system A relative ranking of Pleistocene sites Young ages fail; the survival ceiling is the strongest young-earth point
Luminescence Stored radiation dose divided by the sediment's dose rate, zeroed by sunlight Five authors, 1994 to 2020: dose rate, crystal sensitivity, uncertainty budget 5 to 10 per cent in favourable material; the failures come from unbleached grains and were caught by the field Bleaching at burial, the dose-rate history, and water content, worth about ±10 per cent Up to about 100 to 150 thousand years in quartz The young-earth position is weak
Cosmogenic nuclides Exposure: atoms divided by production rate. Burial: aluminium-26 decaying against beryllium-10 Oard 2021: a much higher past cosmic-ray flux, and burial ratios from accelerated decay after the Flood Hold-out misses of 7.1 to 27.1 per cent (Borchers 2016); Missouri burial ages agree with stacking and magnetism (Balco and Rovey 2008) Exposure: production rate and past flux. Burial: two decay constants Exposure from about 600 years (Kurz 1990); burial from about 0.2 to 4 million years (Balco and Rovey 2008) The exposure critique is partly right; burial dating is unanswered
Uranium series Thorium-230 grown from uranium in coral and cave calcite, with protactinium-231 as a check Silvestru, Oard and Hebert: open systems, fast growth, circular calibration; Mogk 2023: a pulse of acceleration in the Flood Two decay chains agree; ages match tree rings and Greenland ice layers; the failures are published A thorium-free start and a closed system, screened by δ²³⁴U and X-ray diffraction To about 600 thousand years at ±12 thousand (Cheng 2013) Uniform acceleration is untouched; non-uniform acceleration is excluded to 0.015 per cent

Three things stand out.

The two clocks built as young-earth arguments are the two with the softest rates.  The sodium budget and the helium budget both turn on fluxes that nobody has measured directly over the whole earth, and both children say the mainstream budgets do not close either.  That is why each can give only a ceiling.  And on its own authors' figures, each ceiling is millions of years.

The argon clock is the reverse case.  Its inventory is a mass times a mole fraction times an isotope ratio, and its flux was measured twice by unrelated routes:  in Antarctic ice and, in a figure Andrew Snelling quoted in RATE's first volume, in a German borehole.  So the one clock in the section with a measured rate is also the one with the largest gap to a young earth.

The four recent-past methods each have one or two assumptions that matter, and each child names them.  For racemization they are the burial temperature and the calibration sample.  For luminescence it is complete bleaching.  For exposure ages it is the production rate, and for burial ages and uranium series it is the decay constants.  Every documented failure in those four articles traces to a cause the field can test for on a particular sample or in a particular procedure:  a misdated calibration bone, grains that never saw daylight, uranium that moved in or out of a bone, inherited nuclides, a single-grain decision rule.  None traces to a decay rate.

Part 9: What a young reading needs from each clock

The children price each young-earth reading.  The table carries their arithmetic as they give it.

Clock Published figure What a reading of a few thousand years needs Worked in
Ocean sodium A ceiling of 62 million years (Austin and Humphreys) A sea created salty, a Flood surge, and elevated rates afterward; the clock itself supplies only the ceiling Ocean salinity
Air helium-4 1.76 million years (Vardiman) A crustal flux about three hundred times the published value, or created helium that the ³He/⁴He ratio excludes; 6,000 years of degassing supplies 0.24 per cent of the air's helium-4 Atmospheric helium
Air argon-40 6,000 years at the measured flux supplies one part in 2.5 million Decay 1.6 million times faster across 6,000 years, or 9.5 billion times faster inside a Flood year, and whole-mantle degassing in that year Atmospheric argon
Amino acid racemization A 70-million-year fossil should be racemic at any temperature at or above freezing Nothing to accelerate; a 2 °C error in burial temperature moves an age 63 per cent and a 10 °C error by a factor of 10.7 Racemization
Luminescence A 32.5-thousand-year dune, the article's worked example Decay of uranium-238, thorium-232 and potassium-40 averaging 7.5 times today's rate in that dune since it was buried after the Flood Luminescence
Cosmogenic exposure Oard's six showcase sites A past flux 2.4 to 222 times modern, set by the durations Oard assigns Cosmogenic
Cosmogenic burial Ratios of three to four, which Oard concedes, giving 1.08 and 1.68 million years Both decay constants 241 to 373 times faster after the Flood Cosmogenic
Uranium series From 30,470 years for a deglacial Barbados coral (Bard) to 3.83 million for a Nullarbor stalagmite dated by uranium-lead (Hu) Speed-ups of 7 to 851 after the Flood, identical for uranium-238 and uranium-234 to within 0.015 per cent and for thorium-230 and protactinium-231 to about a per cent Uranium series

The pattern in the last column is the main result of this section.  For the four recent-past methods, the factor a young reading needs is the published age divided by the time since the Flood, so it grows in step with the published age.  A sample published at 30,000 years needs 7.  A sample published at 641,000 years needs 143.  A sample published at 3.8 million years needs 851.  An error of that kind is not a failure of one sample.  It has to run through every sample, in every method, in proportion to its age.  And where a decay clock is checked against a clock with no decay in it, the two have to keep agreeing:  the youngest Barbados corals against tree-ring-calibrated radiocarbon, and uranium-series ages against Greenland's counted ice layers.  The failures the children document are a different kind of thing.  They are a factor of 1.5 to about 19, on particular samples, each with a named cause, and each was found by a second method that disagreed.

Part 10: When the young-earth literature puts accelerated decay

Accelerated nuclear decay is the young-earth answer to radiometric ages, and it reaches only some of these clocks.  Salt and racemization involve no decay.  An exposure age involves decay only as a correction of 0.3 per cent over 12,000 years.  Helium and argon are decay products.  For helium, faster decay makes the young reading harder, because it would fill the crust with radiogenic helium that a created atmosphere has no room for.  For argon, faster decay could make enough argon but cannot move it out of the rock in time.  Both children price those problems.  That leaves luminescence, through its dose rate, cosmogenic burial dating, and the uranium series.  For those three, what matters is when the acceleration happened, because a sample formed after an episode ended carries no trace of it.

Two children disagree, and the sources settle it

The luminescence article says that Andrew Snelling's placement of accelerated decay "during and soon after the flood"3 is RATE's position and the place every published young-earth proposal puts it, and that moving the acceleration into post-Flood history is something nobody claims.  The uranium-series article says RATE places its episodes at Creation and in the Flood year, so that nothing is available to a carbonate that grew afterward.  Both cannot be right about RATE.  The primary sources say:

  1. RATE puts no episode after the Flood. Russell Humphreys' chapter in RATE's first volume proposes "three episodes: one in the early part of the Creation week, another between the Fall and the Flood, and the third during the year of the Genesis Flood," and its Figure 2 shows the same three.28 The uranium-series article is right about RATE, and the luminescence article is wrong to call "soon after" RATE's position.
  2. Snelling, writing for Answers in Genesis in 2018, does put it after the Flood: radioactive elements "decayed rapidly during and soon after the flood."3 That is his popular summary, not a model with rates.
  3. Michael Oard puts it through the Ice Age and applies it to exactly these methods. His 2021 CRSQ abstract says the high cosmic rays "may also be a cause for accelerated radiometric decay during the Flood and Ice Age," and that "accelerated radiometric decay after the Flood telescopes other Quaternary dating methods to the time after the Flood."23 His burial-dating paragraph says the same of aluminium-26 and beryllium-10: "This means that much accelerated radiometric decay has taken place after the Flood."23 A few lines later: "Therefore, accelerated radiometric decay continued for a while after the Flood (Table I)."23
  4. Nathan Mogk puts it in the Flood, as a pulse, and leaves the door open afterward. He concludes "that to first order, decay acceleration during the Flood must be pulse-like."29 His reservoir-relaxation mechanism, he writes, "obviates the need for a gradual ramp-down" of accelerated decay after the Flood. He then adds, citing Oard, "There may still be evidence of post-Flood AND in the ratios of cosmogenic radionuclides," where AND is his abbreviation for accelerated nuclear decay.29

So the luminescence article is wrong twice.  RATE does not say "soon after."  And acceleration after the Flood is claimed in print:  Snelling's own phrase allows it, and Oard states it outright, through the Ice Age, for the Quaternary dating methods.  The uranium-series article is right about RATE but goes too far about Mogk.  It calls him the one young-earth author to have put a post-Flood acceleration in print, and prices his 66-million-year "modern period" as a post-Flood speed-up of about 1.5 × 10⁴.  Mogk prints that number as a time-averaged figure on the way to concluding that acceleration was a Flood-year pulse, and he offers relaxation, not continued acceleration, as the reason post-Flood volcanoes give old ages.  The post-Flood acceleration in print is Oard's.

What that changes

The luminescence article's decisive argument is that sunlight empties a grain's traps at burial, so a dune laid down after the Flood is out of reach of any Flood-year acceleration.  That still answers RATE, and it answers Mogk's first-order pulse.  It does not answer Oard, or Snelling's "soon after" for a dune laid down inside that window.  On Oard's placement, a dune bleached early in the Ice Age would then have been dosed during the acceleration, and the question is no longer whether the speed-up can reach the dune but what it costs.

The children have already priced that cost, though only the cosmogenic article aimed its figure at Oard:

  1. It must be uniform where it can be checked, to a degree no proposed mechanism delivers. Measured δ²³⁴U in equilibrium carbonates holds uranium-238 and uranium-234 to the same speed-up within 0.015 per cent, where a barrier-changing mechanism big enough to matter would drive them apart by a factor of 9.53.
  2. It must deliver very different totals to samples that all formed within a few thousand years. Post-Flood carbonates need speed-ups from 7 to 851 depending on the record, a 32.5-thousand-year dune needs 7.5, and Oard's own burial ratios need 241 to 373. An acceleration that fell off through the Ice Age could in principle give older samples more of it, but nobody has written down the curve and tested it against all three methods at once.
  3. It must leave the counting clocks alone. Bard's three youngest Barbados corals agree with tree-ring-calibrated radiocarbon,30 and Greenland's counted ice layers agree with the uranium-series cave chronology from Hulu to within 800 years over 60,000.25 Tree rings and ice layers contain no decay.
  4. Oard's own paper does not commit to a size. In the same paragraph he weighs two effects of the acceleration on beryllium-10, fewer atoms from faster decay against more from the neutrons that faster uranium and thorium decay would release, and writes that they may "cancel each other and the net effect would be small."23 The cosmogenic article shows that his own burial ratios need a factor of 241 to 373, which is not small.

The settled position, then, is a dilemma that no young-earth author has addressed in print.  Confine acceleration to the Flood year, as RATE and Mogk do, and every post-Flood luminescence, uranium-series and burial age is unexplained.  Mogk's relaxation is offered for magma reservoirs, and the uranium-series article shows why it cannot work for corals or cave calcite, whose source waters cannot hold thorium.  Extend it through the Ice Age, as Oard does, and it has to compress three methods by factors that grow with sample age, keep two uranium isotopes in lockstep, and leave tree rings and ice layers agreeing with the results.  Nobody has published a decay-rate history that tries.

Objections and responses

These objections cut across the children.  Objections to a single clock are answered in that clock's article.

"Every failure in these articles makes an age too old.  A one-way pattern of errors is itself evidence that the methods inflate ages."

Most of the documented failures do run too old.  Bada's Californian skeletons came out nine to nineteen times too old.  Jinmium came out at least twelve times too old.19  Prescott and Purvinskis reported in 1991 that the then-standard thermoluminescence protocol gave "several thousand years" for a dune less than ten years old.31  At Lake Mungo, four methods agreed on 62,000 years for a burial later put at 40,000.32 33  Not all of them run that way:  Thomsen's single-grain procedure would have made ages more than 40 per cent too young, feldspar signals fade and give ages that are too young, and an eroding surface gives an exposure age that is a minimum.

Kurt Wise put the same pattern to his own movement in 1986, as a burden on the critic:  a complete critique must explain why the dates are all too old.2  The standard is fair, and the children meet it for the errors that have been found.  Each over-estimate has a cause that adds apparent age:  a calibration bone thought older than it was, charge left in grains that never saw daylight, nuclides inherited from an earlier exposure, uranium taken up by a bone after burial.  Each cause has a test, and in each case the test was how the error was found.  What Wise's standard asks of the young-earth side is harder.  It needs an account of why every method, on every sample, would be too old by a factor that grows in step with the sample's published age, as Part 9 shows.  None of the young-earth sources the children read offers one.

"The mainstream budgets do not close either.  Why hold the young-earth clocks to a standard the old-earth ones fail?"

They do not close, and three children say so in their own voice.  Polar-wind escape removes about 0.57 of the helium the crust supplies.8  About half the argon-40 the earth should have made is not in the air, and Bender and colleagues write that the usual home for it, an undegassed lower mantle, "is problematic to maintain."12  Drever, Li and Maynard carry a river excess of sodium that they close with episodic evaporite events, not with anything happening now.5  Each of those gaps is a factor of about two inside an old-earth chronology.  A young reading needs a gap in the opposite direction and far larger:  a crustal helium flux about three hundred times the published one, or argon decay 1.6 million times faster than today.  An open budget is not a young one.

"Every one of these methods is calibrated against another dating method, so their agreement is circular."

Some are, and the children concede it.  Exposure-age production rates are fitted to surfaces dated by radiocarbon, which is the point Oard made in 1997 and the cosmogenic article grants in full.  Racemization needs a calibration sample of known age, and Penkman's ranking is not converted to years at all.  But several of the checks in this section share no calibration with what they test.  A burial age contains no production rate.  The argon flux was measured on a mass spectrometer and needs no model of the earth.  The δ²³⁴U test compares a uranium-series ratio with a uranium-lead age read at the other end of the same chain.  The Missouri tills set a nuclide ratio against the order of the layers and the direction of their magnetism.  And the cosmogenic article points out that a method that were purely circular could not fail its own hold-out test, as the production-rate fits do, by different amounts for different nuclides.

"Concordance proves nothing.  At Lake Mungo four methods agreed and all were wrong."

The luminescence and uranium-series articles both concede the case and both explain it the same way.  Electron spin resonance, thorium-uranium and protactinium-uranium were all reading the same uranium in the same bone, under one shared assumption about when it arrived, so they were never independent.  The lesson is to ask what two methods share before counting their agreement.  A Barbados coral and a tree ring share nothing.  A nuclide ratio, a stacking order and a remanent magnetism share no physical parameter.  Those are the agreements the children rest on.

"A global Flood opened every one of these reservoirs, so none of them can be read."

For the two young-earth clocks, the young reading itself needs the reservoir opened:  a sea created salty and topped up by the Flood, an atmosphere created with its helium already in it.  The children test both openings with independent data, fluid inclusions in halite for the sea and the ³He/⁴He ratio for the air, and the data do not show them.  For the four recent-past methods, closure is checked sample by sample:  the initial δ²³⁴U window and X-ray diffraction for corals, thorium-232 for detrital dirt, zero-age samples and single-grain tests for luminescence, the sealed intracrystalline fraction for racemization.  And on a young-earth chronology nearly every sample these four methods date formed after the Flood, so the Flood cannot have opened it.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. Two children need correcting on when young-earth authors place accelerated decay. The luminescence article calls Snelling's "during and soon after the flood" RATE's position and says nobody places acceleration in post-Flood history; RATE's own chapter has no post-Flood episode, and Oard 2021 places acceleration through the Ice Age for Quaternary methods. The uranium-series article describes Mogk 2023 as having put a post-Flood acceleration in print; Mogk argues for a Flood-year pulse and explains post-Flood volcanic ages by reservoir relaxation instead. Part 10 states the settled position. Neither change alters either child's verdict against RATE.
  2. No young-earth author has published a post-Flood decay-rate history. Oard asserts one and then suggests its effects cancel. A history that compressed luminescence, uranium-series and burial ages together, kept uranium-238 and uranium-234 in lockstep, and left tree rings and ice layers agreeing would be a real contribution, and none of the children found one.
  3. The protein-survival ceiling is open. Bada's rate law and Demarchi's concession set limits that reported dinosaur soft tissue appears to exceed. The racemization article treats this as the strongest young-earth point in the section and leaves the question of endogeneity to Dinosaur Soft Tissue.
  4. R. H. Brown's replacement argument has not been assessed. When he dropped the atmospheric-helium argument in 1998 he put in its place a claim about excess helium-3 retained in minerals. The helium article quotes it and does not answer it, and nothing else on this site does either.
  5. Several load-bearing sources are still unread. Murray and Olley 2002, the compilation behind the usual statements of luminescence accuracy. Edwards et al. 1997's sample-by-sample protactinium-thorium table. Holland 1978's Table 5-11, which carries the largest disputed sodium sink. Axford 1968 and Vardiman's 1990 helium monograph. Zreda et al. 1993, the missing known-age eruption test for cosmogenic chlorine-36. Allègre, Hofmann and O'Nions 1996 on mantle argon, read so far only through Ozima and Podosek.
  6. Four cheap tests have never been run, by either side. A measured ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be ratio well below 6.75 in sediment of independently known young age would break burial dating. The salt-magma origin of rock salt has never been tested against bromine profiles or fluid-inclusion evaporation paths. Nobody publishes what fraction of analysed corals and speleothems fail the uranium-series screens. And no published luminescence age carries the full Type B uncertainty budget that Larry DeWerd asks for.
  7. The negative findings about the young-earth literature have stated limits. The children enumerated the International Conference on Creationism at full text, all 457 papers with controls, and the Journal of Creation and CRSQ by contents and full-text index. The CRSQ repository does not hold the journal's letters column, and ICR's own search returns nothing for words that appear in the titles of its articles, so no claim of silence is made about either.

Verdict

None of these seven clocks gives a young earth.  The two built to do so give ceilings of millions of years on their authors' own arithmetic, and the young-earth literature has retired one of them itself.

Each clock can honestly say something narrower than its users claim.  The sodium budget says the sea is not in steady state, which the mainstream has said since at least 1988;  it does not say the sea is young.  The helium budget says escape and supply are both still uncertain to a factor of about two;  it says nothing about thousands of years.  The argon inventory says that a great deal of potassium decayed and that its argon got out of the rock, and it is the hardest number in the section.  Racemization gives a relative order of Pleistocene sites, and it sets a ceiling on protein survival that is the best young-earth material here.  Luminescence gives the time since a grain last saw daylight, which its practitioners put at 5 to 10 per cent in good material and up to about 100 to 150 thousand years in quartz.  Cosmogenic burial ages, over the range of about 0.2 to 4 million years that Balco and Rovey give, cannot be moved by any change in cosmic rays.  Uranium-series ages, which Cheng and colleagues take to about 600 thousand years, say that whatever happened to decay rates happened to five alpha emitters together.

The young-earth case on these clocks is strongest where it is narrowest:  open helium and sodium budgets, calibration-dependent exposure and racemization ages, the protein-survival ceiling, and the fact that a uniform speed-up of decay cannot be seen from inside the uranium series.  It is weakest where it would need to be strongest:  every recent-past age would have to be too old by a factor that grows with the age, in every method at once, while the clocks with no decay in them kept agreeing.  The young-earth authors who place accelerated decay where it could do that work, Andrew Snelling in a popular article and Michael Oard in a technical one, have not given it a size or a history.  That is the paper this section is waiting for.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Vardiman, Larry.  “Evidence for a Young Earth from the Ocean and Atmosphere.”  Institute for Creation Research (icr.org).  Oct 8, 2005.  Section Minor Gases in the Atmosphere.  A web essay by Vardiman for the Institute for Creation Research, dated Saturday, 8 October 2005.  It withdraws Vardiman's own 1990 helium argument, and its reference list gives that earlier work in full: "Vardiman, L., 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, CA, 1990."  Three paragraphs later the essay declines to use the atmospheric argon inventory as a clock, because "the rate of escape from the crust to the atmosphere is uncertain" and "Diffusion rates of argon from various minerals need to be validated."  So in one article Vardiman retires the helium argument because a flux was measured and declines the argon argument because a flux was not; both moves are consistent, and together they concede that these inventory arguments live or die on measured fluxes.  The article uses it because Vardiman withdrew the helium argument in this essay in 2005. ↩ ↩

  2. 2.

    Wise, Kurt P.  “The Way Geologists Date!”  Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism 1:I:135–138.  Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh.  Edited by R. E. Walsh, C. L. Brooks and R. S. Crowell.  1986.  A paper written for creationists that reviews the three methods geologists use to date rocks: superpositional stratigraphy, biostratigraphy and radiometric dating.  It finds that each method has difficulties, but none is faulty enough to be rejected, and it urges creationists to test the methods rather than list their errors.  The article uses it as a creationist author's own statement that a list of errors does not reject radiometric dating.

    1. 2a.

      Page 138:  “Yet a simple list of errors is insufficient to reject the method.  If creationism is true, radiometric dates are wrong, but the fact that they are wrong in the same direction (all too old) must be explained for a critique to be complete.”  The closing paragraph of his review of the three ways geologists date rocks, before his worked example. ↩ ↩

  3. 3.

    Snelling, A. A.  “How Reliable Are Dates for Human Fossils?”  Answers.  Sep 1, 2018.  A magazine article, not a technical paper, that explains how luminescence dating works and sets out three assumptions behind it.  It is the fullest young-earth treatment of luminescence dating that this article has found.  The article quotes it for its account of how the method works, which the article judges accurate, and for its claim that dates of 2 million years may actually be a hundred years or just ten years.

    1. 3a.

      “Multiple lines of evidence show that radioactive elements decayed rapidly during and soon after the flood, so these “early” dates must be calibrated to the biblical timeframe—a matter of months, years, or decades, not millions of years.”  The 4,350-year date is his own, from the same article:  “The Bible gives a very different picture of human history, however, including creation 6,000 years ago and cataclysmic changes brought on by Noah's flood about 4,350 years ago.” ↩ ↩ ↩

  4. 4.

    Austin, Steven A., and D. Russell Humphreys.  “The Sea's Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists.”  Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, 17–33.  Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh.  Edited by R. E. Walsh and C. L. Brooks.  1990.  A 1990 conference paper that adds up the sodium that rivers, sea floor sediments and other sources deliver to the ocean, and the sodium that known processes remove.  It finds that known removal accounts for only 27% of the sodium delivered, and uses a differential equation with minimum inputs and maximum outputs to reach a maximum age of 62 million years.  Steven A. Austin of the Institute for Creation Research and D. Russell Humphreys of Sandia National Laboratories wrote it, and the article treats its 62 million year cap as the central young-earth sodium argument.  Mirror:  Static.icr.org

    1. 4a.

      Section Conclusion:  The sentence follows their statement that the result is an upper limit on the age of the ocean, not an age.  “According to the creationist model, most of the Na+ in the ocean is there as a result of creation and the Genesis Flood, not as a result of Na+ input due to geologic processes sustained over a billion years.  This leaves room for the possibility that the sea is less than 10,000 years old.” ↩

  5. 5.

    Drever, James I. et al.  “Geochemical Cycles: The Continental Crust and the Oceans.”  Chemical Cycles in the Evolution of the Earth, 17–53.  John Wiley, New York.  Edited by C. B. Gregor, R. M. Garrels, F. T. Mackenzie and J. B. Maynard.  1988.  A chapter from a 1988 book on chemical cycles in the evolution of the earth, written by the three authors named here.  The article uses it for the ocean-floor sediment input, which is sodium diffusing up out of sediment pore water into the sea.

    1. 5a.

      Page 30:  Emphasis added. ↩

    2. 5b.

      Page 51:  Emphasis added.  The preceding sentences set up the arithmetic:  “In the late Miocene, about 25 × 1018 moles of NaCl were deposited in the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, and nearby basins (Holser et al., 1980).  This amount is about 4% of the present mass of NaCl in the oceans.  The excess flux from rivers calculated in Table 1.8 is 2.2 × 1012 moles/yr.  Thus, the depletion of NaCl by the Miocene event can be replaced in 11 × 106 years, compared with the approximately 5 × 106 years that have elapsed since the event.”  The 2.2 × 1012 mol/yr river excess quoted in the text above is 5.1 × 1010 kg of sodium a year at 22.99 g/mol. ↩

  6. 6.

    Lowenstein, Tim K. et al.  “Oscillations in Phanerozoic Seawater Chemistry: Evidence from Fluid Inclusions.”  Science 294(5544):1086–1088.  Nov 2, 2001.  A research paper that measured the chemistry of tiny brine pockets trapped in chevron halite (salt crystals that formed on the floor of an evaporating brine body), using an electron microscope with an X-ray analyser, in halites from the Late Precambrian, Cambrian, Silurian, Permian, Cretaceous and modern times, supplemented by published Permian and Tertiary analyses.  It found that seawater's Mg2+/Ca2+ ratio and Na+ level shifted in step with sea-floor spreading rates, sea level and the mineralogy of limestones and evaporites, with relatively high Na+ in the Late Precambrian, Permian and Tertiary to present and relatively low Na+ in the Cambrian, Silurian and Cretaceous.  The article uses its sodium oscillation, which the authors argue dolomitisation cannot explain.  Mirror:  Scholar.archive.org ↩

  7. 7.

    Hay, William W. et al.  “Evaporites and the salinity of the ocean during the Phanerozoic: Implications for climate, ocean circulation and life.”  Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 240(1–2):3–46.  2006.  A reconstruction of ocean salinity through the Phanerozoic, built from the volumes of salt deposits that were removed from seawater, using both the smallest and the largest estimates of those volumes.  It concludes that salinity changed significantly and generally fell, with the biggest changes when salt was deposited in young ocean basins as Pangaea broke apart, and it warns that these deposits are the least well known.  The article uses its salt inventory against Austin and Humphreys' sodium input, and its account of why the earlier Palaeozoic compilation missed the deep-sea salt.  Mirror:  Scholar.archive.org ↩

  8. 8.

    Kashyap, Jyotsna.  “The Relationship between the Polar Wind and the Terrestrial Helium Budget.”  MSc thesis, Department of Physics and Astronomy.  University of Calgary.  Sep 2009.  A 2009 master's thesis in physics at the University of Calgary, written under the supervision of Andrew Yau, and the most useful modern document on the atmospheric helium budget.  It traces simulated helium ions out of the polar ionosphere under a range of interplanetary magnetic field and geomagnetic activity conditions, and finds an escape fraction of ~ 50 to 78%, which it calls conceivably sufficient to explain the current terrestrial helium budget.  It states the problem in mainstream terms, gives every flux with its source, and criticises the paper that the standard counter-apologetic rests on.  The article uses it for the best modern figure on the helium loss. ↩ ↩

  9. 9.

    Vardiman, Larry.  “The Age of the Earth's Atmosphere Estimated by its Helium Content.”  Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism (Pittsburgh, 4–9 August 1986), 187–194.  Edited by R. E. Walsh, C. L. Brooks and R. S. Crowell.  1986.  Section Abstract:  “If the earth is billions of years old, the radioactive production of helium in the earth's crust should have added a large quantity of helium to its atmosphere.  Current diffusion models all indicate that helium escapes to space from the atmosphere at a rate much less than its production rate.  The low concentration of helium actually measured would suggest that the earth's atmosphere must be quite young.”  A technical paper given at the 1986 creationist conference, which works out the age of the atmosphere from its helium.  Its stated values are: atmospheric ⁴He 3.8 × 10¹⁵ g ≈ 6 × 10³⁸ atoms; atmospheric ³He 5.3 × 10⁹ g ≈ 1 × 10³³ atoms; ³He/⁴He 1.4 × 10⁻⁶; ⁴He column density 1.1 × 10²⁰ atoms/cm²; crustal source flux 2 × 10⁶ atoms cm⁻² s⁻¹; his own Jeans escape flux 5 × 10⁴ atoms cm⁻² s⁻¹ at T_exo = 1500 K; MacDonald's solar-cycle-averaged escape 6 × 10⁴; ⁴He residence time about 2 × 10⁶ yr; ⁴He characteristic escape time about 70 × 10⁶ yr.  The article uses it as the technical version of the argument, where Vardiman states the young-earth model and works out 1.76 million years.  Mirror:  Digitalcommons.cedarville.edu ↩

  10. 10.

    Brown, R. H.  “Unique Enigmatic Helium.”  Origins 25(2):55–73.  1998.  Section Acknowledgments:  “I have been assisted from discussions with Drs. Benjamin Clausen, Paul Giem, and Clyde Webster … Appreciation is due unnamed reviewers for a wide range of clarifications in the final manuscript.”  A research article in Origins, the refereed journal of the Geoscience Research Institute, Loma Linda, California.  Its summary says that models of the atmosphere's helium built on diffusion from the crust and thermal loss to space give unreasonable results, and that helium escapes Earth mostly by nonthermal processes, chiefly a polar wind of ions.  The article uses it because Brown repudiated the atmospheric-helium young-earth argument in 1998 and singled out Malcolm's 1994 paper as its recent example.  Mirror:  Grisda.org ↩

  11. 11.

    Meshik, Alex et al.  “Heavy noble gases in solar wind delivered by Genesis mission.”  Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 127:326–347.  2014.  A laboratory study of the heavy noble gases, argon, krypton and xenon, in solar wind gas caught by NASA's Genesis mission collectors, with results independently verified by other laboratories.  The article uses its solar-wind argon-40 limit, which the authors read as showing that the argon-40 they measured comes from contamination on Earth.  Mirror:  PMC ↩

  12. 12.

    Bender, Michael L. et al.  “The contemporary degassing rate of ⁴⁰Ar from the solid Earth.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(24):8232–8237.  2008.  A research paper that measured the argon-40 trapped in Antarctic ice cores, reaching back almost 800 ka, to find how fast argon-40 is still leaking from Earth's interior into the air.  Its measured rate is 1.1 ± 0.1 × 10⁸ mol per year, and the authors say the uncertainties are large.  The article relies on it for the present rate of argon-40 outgassing and for the point that a hidden, undegassed reservoir in the lower mantle is hard to defend.  Mirror:  PMC ↩

    1. 12a.

      Page 8232:  “The most parsimonious explanation for the remainder is that there is a large reservoir containing undegassed Ar, which is presumably the lower mantle (1).  However, extensive seismic evidence has shown that oceanic plates subduct into the lower mantle while plumes rise from the core-mantle boundary to produce volcanism at the surface (e.g., refs. 2 and 3).  Because of such observations, it is problematic to maintain that the lower mantle is undegassed.” ↩

  13. 13.

    Slusher, Harold S.  “Critique of Radiometric Dating.”  ICR Technical Monograph No. 2.  San Diego: Institute for Creation Research.  1st, with a 2nd edition in 1981.  1973.  Section Table of contents, 1981 edition:  “C. Criticism of the Potassium-Argon-Method .... 38”.  1973 edition, cross-reference:  “(See addendum on page 47.)”  A young-earth monograph from the Institute for Creation Research that criticises radiometric dating, including the potassium-argon method.  The article uses its argon paragraph because Slusher's 1981 conclusion is that the air must have started with a large amount of argon-40.  Mirror:  Archive.org ↩

  14. 14.

    Cook, Melvin A.  Prehistory and Earth Models.  London: Max Parrish and Co. Ltd.  1966.  A 1966 book by Melvin A. Cook that works out how much argon-40 and potassium-40 the Earth and its air should contain.  Morris's 1974 book says it assumes Cook's calculations are right.  The article uses it because two young-earth geochemical arguments, the argon one and the atmospheric helium one, both trace back to it. ↩

  15. 15.

    Taylor, R. E.  “Six decades of radiocarbon dating in New World archaeology.”  Radiocarbon 51(1):173–212.  2009.  A review of six decades of radiocarbon dating in New World archaeology by an anthropologist who is also affiliated with an accelerator dating laboratory at the University of California, Irvine.  It explains that accelerator mass spectrometry, from the late 1970s, works on milligram amounts of carbon, which allowed more careful dating of certain samples, particularly human skeletal material.  The article uses it for the Californian skeleton dates, because it reproduces the accelerator values from a 1985 paper by Taylor and colleagues.  Mirror:  Cambridge.org ↩

  16. 16.

    Bada, Jeffrey L.  “Amino acid racemization dating of fossil bones.”  Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 13:241–268.  1985.  A review article that surveys amino acid racemization dating of fossil bones, written by a researcher at the Amino Acid Dating Laboratory at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  It fits an Arrhenius equation to heated modern bone, fossil bone and living human teeth, and says the method can date Holocene and Upper Pleistocene fossils.  The article uses it for Bada's own admission that an erroneously dated calibration sample gives erroneous ages, for his activation energy, and for his ground-temperature estimate at Olduvai.  Mirror:  Articles.adsabs.harvard.edu

    1. 16a.

      Page 264. ↩

  17. 17.

    Penkman, Kirsty E. H. et al.  “A chronological framework for the British Quaternary based on Bithynia opercula.”  Nature 476(7361):446–449.  2011.  A dating study that measured 470 opercula, the calcite lids of the freshwater snail Bithynia, from 74 British sites spanning the whole Quaternary.  The operculum closes the shell opening in life, and its protein breaks down with age, so the authors rank the shells by how far that protein has broken down and find the ranking agrees with known stratigraphy and independent dating.  The article cites it as the point where the rebuilt method meets independent data.  Mirror:  Europe PMC ↩

  18. 18.

    Demarchi, Beatrice et al.  “Protein sequences bound to mineral surfaces persist into deep time.”  eLife 5:e17092.  Sep 27, 2016.  A research paper by 32 authors, including Kirsty Penkman and Matthew Collins.  It models the proteins struthiocalcin-1 and struthiocalcin-2 against the calcite surface, and finds that the domain with the strongest calculated binding energy to calcite is the one that is selectively preserved.  The article treats it as the best mainstream answer to the claim that tissues survive in dinosaur fossils, because it gives a specific mechanism with a computed prediction, and the article says that prediction came true.  Mirror:  Cdn.elifesciences.org

    1. 18a.

      Section Introduction, page 2:  The article quotes it in full in its body, with the authors' own parenthetical citations as printed.  The pull quotation at the head of the page is the same sentence with those parentheses removed, and nothing else changed. ↩

  19. 19.

    Roberts, R. G. et al.  “Optical and radiocarbon dating at Jinmium rock shelter in northern Australia.”  Nature 393:358–362.  May 28, 1998.  A letter to Nature that redated the Jinmium rock shelter with optical dating, which measures when sand grains were last exposed to sunlight, and with radiocarbon dates on charcoal.  It found the base of the deposit about 22 thousand years old when many grains were dated together, but younger than 10 thousand years when single grains were dated, which matches radiocarbon for the upper two-thirds.  The authors say that grains with too little sunlight before burial make the grouped dates too old, and one co-author, Richard Fullagar, was also an author of the 1996 report.  The article cites it as the redating of Jinmium, and quotes its abstract for the numbers and the mechanism behind the earlier overestimates. ↩ ↩

  20. 20.

    Thomsen, K. J. et al.  “Testing single-grain quartz OSL methods using sediment samples with independent age control from the Bordes-Fitte rockshelter (Roches d'Abilly, Central France).”  Quaternary Geochronology 31:77–96.  2016.  A research paper that tests single-grain quartz OSL, which measures one grain of quartz at a time, against four sediment samples from the Bordes-Fitte rock shelter in France whose ages were already dated by radiocarbon and by multi-grain OSL.  Its abstract reports that the standard single-grain modelling decisions would have underestimated ages by more than 40%, and the authors conclude that multi-grain analysis gives the most accurate ages for these samples.  Murray co-authored the single-aliquot protocol that the field now uses, and Thomsen the post-IR IRSL method for feldspar, so the article presents the paper as a test from inside the field.  Mirror:  Scholar.archive.org ↩

  21. 21.

    DeWerd, L. A.  “Dating Uncertainties with Thermoluminescence.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 56(4):212–220.  2020.  Page 212:  “Thermoluminescent measurements, when all uncertainties or the process are accounted for, show dates less than 6000 years.”  The abstract's headline claim, p. 212, is printed with "or" where "of" is meant in the original.  “Careful control of the thermoluminescence can result in good accuracy.”  A review and worked example by a medical physicist, published in the Spring 2020 issue and accepted for publication 1 April 2020.  The paper's footnote gives his affiliation as "Larry A DeWerd, PhD, Medical Physics Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI."  The paper uses an alkali halide, LiF:Mg,Ti, as its example to argue that a thermoluminescence date needs a full uncertainty budget, of the kind a calibration laboratory would require, rather than a standard deviation, and it concludes that properly analyzed dates are young.  The article uses it as the most qualified young-earth engagement with luminescence dating, and as the source of the uncertainty criticism that the article concedes. ↩

  22. 22.

    Borchers, Brian et al.  “Geological calibration of spallation production rates in the CRONUS-Earth project.”  Quaternary Geochronology 31:188–198.  2016.  A calibration paper from the CRONUS-Earth project, a U.S. National Science Foundation effort to improve Earth science uses of cosmogenic nuclides, which are rare atoms that cosmic rays make in surface rock.  The authors fitted production rates (how many atoms cosmic rays make per gram of rock per year) for five nuclides under seven scaling frameworks to sites with independent ages, then computed ages at secondary sites held out of the fit.  They found that the calibrated rates fail statistical tests of goodness-of-fit, and that the computed ages miss the independent ages by 7.1% to 27.1% (root-mean-square percent differences), much larger than the typical uncertainties in the site ages, so the article uses it as the field's own admission that its production rates are not yet reliable.  Mirror:  Pure.ed.ac.uk ↩

  23. 23.

    Oard, Michael J.  “Much Greater Cosmic Rays During the Ice Age and Before.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 58(1):30–48.  2021.  A journal article by a young-earth creationist, published in a creationist journal.  It takes seven beryllium-10 (Be-10) measurements that uniformitarian scientists use as showcases for an old Earth and tries to convert them into Biblical earth history.  It concludes that cosmic rays were very high during the Flood and tailed off rapidly during the Ice Age, and the article uses it as the fullest young-earth treatment of cosmogenic nuclide dating in print. ↩

    1. 23a.

      Page 30, section Abstract:  “In spite of this, it appears that the cosmic rays were very high during the Flood and tailed off rapidly during the Ice Age.  These measurements have four implications: 1) high cosmic rays could be due to a nearby supernova or supernovae that may also be a cause for accelerated radiometric decay during the Flood and Ice Age; 2) it accounts for the rapid increase in C-14 after the Flood; 3) accelerated radiometric decay after the Flood telescopes other Quaternary dating methods to the time after the Flood; and 4) finally, we can account for the Be-10 measurements in ice cores.”  The "four complications" of the preceding sentence are the obstacles Oard lists to converting beryllium-10 measurements into Biblical earth history. ↩

    2. 23b.

      Page 39:  “Snelling (2005) found very few radiohaloes in Tertiary-aged granites, interpreted as post-Flood, suggesting that accelerated radiometric decay had ended.  But this result could be due to the lack of enough radioactive nuclides settling in one precise spot to form a halo, since halos first appear after 108 atoms have collected in that one spot.  Besides, the Tertiary likely is mostly from the Flood (Oard, 2014).  Therefore, accelerated radiometric decay continued for a while after the Flood (Table I).”  The passage follows directly on the burial-ratio sentence.  The figure printed as 108 is 10 to the 8th power;  the superscript is lost in the text layer. ↩

    3. 23c.

      Page 39. ↩

    4. 23d.

      Page 39:  Two sentences after the passage above, where the paper offers accelerated radiometric decay of uranium and thorium as another possible cause of the high Be-10 values. ↩

  24. 24.

    Balco, Greg, and Charles W. II Rovey.  “An isochron method for cosmogenic-nuclide dating of buried soils and sediments.”  American Journal of Science 308:1083–1114.  Dec 2008.  A method paper, published in December 2008, on dating buried ancient soils (paleosols) from the ratio of aluminium-26 to beryllium-10 in their quartz grains, because the two decay at different speeds once burial stops new atoms from forming.  The authors sampled tills and buried soils in one area of central Missouri and found that the four tills give stratigraphically consistent ages that agree with magnetic age constraints, placing ice advances near 1.25 Ma, near 0.8 Ma, and twice between about 0.4 and 0.2 Ma.  The article uses it as its second clock, burial dating, and a follow-up by the same two authors turned these isochrons into a regional glacial chronology (Absolute chronology for major Pleistocene advances of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, Geology 38, no. 9 (2010): 795–798, doi:10.1130/G30946.1). ↩

  25. 25.

    Svensson, A. et al.  “A 60 000 year Greenland stratigraphic ice core chronology.”  Climate of the Past 4:47–57.  2008.  A research paper that dated Greenland ice by counting its yearly layers back 60,000 years, then compared the count with the Hulu Cave record from China.  It assumes that the Greenland climate events happened at the same time as the events in that cave, and it agrees with the cave to within 800 years.  The article uses it as its check on the ²³⁰Th ages, because counting layers involves no radioactive decay. ↩

    1. 25a.

      Section §8 Conclusions:  “Under the assumption that the climatic events observed in the Greenland stable isotope profiles are synchronous with those seen in Chinese Hulu Cave record, GICC05 agrees with the Hulu Cave time scale within 800 yrs throughout the 60 ka period.  There is a very good match between GICC05 and the Austrian Kleegruben Cave around GI-14/15 and there are good matches to the French Villars Cave at the onsets of GI-12 and GI-17.  The Socotra Moomi Cave record (M1-2) agrees well with GICC05 at onset of GI-12 but does otherwise not compare well to the ice core record.” ↩

  26. 26.

    Reimer, P. J. et al.  “The IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere radiocarbon age calibration curve (0–55 cal kBP).”  Radiocarbon 62:725–757.  2020.  The Northern Hemisphere radiocarbon calibration curve, which converts radiocarbon ages into calendar ages for 0–55 cal kBP.  It dropped all coral data older than 25 cal kBP to avoid erroneous data, because freshwater alteration may have affected those corals.  The article uses it for that cut-off and for the dead-carbon values it gives for speleothems. ↩

  27. 27.

    Hu, H.-M. et al.  “Sub-epsilon natural ²³⁴U/²³⁸U measurements refine the ²³⁴U half-life and U-Th geochronology.”  Science Advances 11.  2025.  A laboratory measurement paper that uses multi-collector mass spectrometry to measure the ratio of uranium-234 to uranium-238 in carbonates, with a reproducibility of ±0.08‰.  On four carbonates that the paper confirms are in secular equilibrium, meaning the two isotopes decay at equal rates, the measured offsets sit close to zero, and the paper refines the ²³⁴U half-life to 245,670 ± 260 years.  The article uses those near-zero values to pin the ratio of the two uranium decay constants. ↩

  28. 28.

    Humphreys, D. Russell.  “Accelerated Nuclear Decay: A Viable Hypothesis?”  Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: A Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative, 333–380.  Institute for Creation Research and Creation Research Society.  Edited by Larry Vardiman, Andrew A. Snelling and Eugene F. Chaffin.  2000.

    1. 28a.

      Page 333:  “To explain this, I propose that since Creation, one or more episodes occurred when nuclear decay rates were billions of times greater than today’s rates.  Possibly there were three episodes: one in the early part of the Creation week, another between the Fall and the Flood, and the third during the year of the Genesis Flood.”  Page 341:  “Possible history of nuclear decay rates, showing several possible episodes of accelerated rates during: (1) early Creation week, (2) the 1656 years between Creation and the Genesis Flood, and (3) the year of the Genesis Flood.”  The first passage is from the chapter's abstract, the second the caption of its Figure 2.  The figure draws decay rates after the Flood as low but not zero, with no further episode. ↩

  29. 29.

    Mogk, Nathan.  “Tapping the Hourglass: Disequilibrium Relaxation Following Accelerated Nuclear Decay.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, 327–345.  Cedarville University International Conference on Creationism.  Edited by J. H. Whitmore.  2023.  A conference paper by Nathan Mogk, an independent researcher in Tucson, Arizona, given to the Ninth International Conference on Creationism.  It develops a mathematical formalism for how accelerated nuclear decay would change radiometric ages, and its abstract names the San Francisco Volcanic field as a place to test the idea.  The article calls it the most technically serious young-earth engagement with uranium-series disequilibrium, and uses it for the four long-lived intermediate isotopes and the pulse-like conclusion.

    1. 29a.

      Page 339:  Quoted verbatim.  “This leads to the conclusion that to first order, decay acceleration during the Flood must be pulse-like.” ↩

    2. 29b.

      Page 336, section IV. Discussion:  “The reservoir relaxation mechanism proposed in this paper obviates the need for a gradual ramp-down of AND, as this will naturally occur post acceleration epoch, while still reproducing the anomalously old measured ages from the immediate post-Flood era, from volcanoes erupted long after the AND epoch.  There may still be evidence of post-Flood AND in the ratios of cosmogenic radionuclides which are commonly used for Quaternary dating (Oard, 2021).”  The opening paragraph of the paper's Discussion.  AND is Mogk's abbreviation for accelerated nuclear decay. ↩

  30. 30.

    Bard, E. et al.  “Calibration of the ¹⁴C timescale over the past 30,000 years using mass spectrometric U-Th ages from Barbados corals.”  Nature 345:405–410.  1990.  A research article in Nature that dates Barbados corals by uranium-thorium mass spectrometry and compares those ages with carbon-14 ages from the same corals.  The uranium-thorium ages agree with tree-ring dates for the three youngest corals, and the carbon-14 ages run younger than the uranium-thorium ages before about 9,000 years ago, by up to about 3,500 years at about 20,000 years ago.  The article uses it for both results, the agreement with tree rings and the size of the carbon-14 offset.

    1. 30a.

      Section Comparison with previous ¹⁴C calibration:  “The three youngest ¹⁴C-dated coral samples (RGF7-4-2, RGF7-5-5 and RGF7-12-2, Table 1) from the Barbados collection are in the range of the precise tree-ring calibration.  Our U-Th ages for these samples are in agreement with the dendrochronological ages (7,440–7,140, 8,970–8,380 and 9,420–8,970 yr BP are the calibrated ¹⁴C dates to be compared with the Th ages of samples RGF7-4-2, RGF7-5-5 and RGF7-12-2, respectively).” ↩

  31. 31.

    Prescott, J. R., and R. Purvinskis.  “Zero thermoluminescence for zero age.”  Ancient TL 9(2):19–20.  1991.  A short report in the journal Ancient TL by two physicists at the University of Adelaide, who retested a new "selective bleach" method on modern dune sands that the old total-bleach method had dated to hundreds or thousands of years.  The old method had failed because those sands were not fully reset to zero when they were deposited, and the new method, which reads the fast-bleaching 325 °C peak, gave modern ages.  The article uses it because young-earth arguments cite the old failure, and because it is the paper that fixed the protocol. ↩

  32. 32.

    Thorne, A. et al.  “Australia's oldest human remains: age of the Lake Mungo 3 skeleton.”  Journal of Human Evolution 36(6):591–612.  1999.  “the best age estimate for the human skeleton is obtained through the combination of U-series and ESR analyses yielding 62,000+/-6000 years.  This age is in close agreement with OSL age estimates on the sediment into which the skeleton was buried of 61,000+/-2000 years.”  A 1999 paper on the age of the Lake Mungo 3 skeleton in Australia, whose best estimate combines U-series and ESR analyses.  The article uses it for the 62,000-year age that ESR, uranium-series and OSL dating agreed on, an age that a later study displaced. ↩

  33. 33.

    Bowler, J. M. et al.  “New ages for human occupation and climatic change at Lake Mungo, Australia.”  Nature 421:837–840.  2003.  “Here we report a new series of 25 optical ages showing that both burials occurred at 40 ± 2 kyr ago and that humans were present at Lake Mungo by 50–46 kyr ago.”  A short report in the letters section of Nature that gives a new series of 25 optical ages for the two Lake Mungo burials.  The article uses it for the revised age of 40 ± 2 thousand years, which replaced the earlier estimate for both burials. ↩