Claim CH210:
The earth is relatively young, about 10,000 years old or less.
Source:
Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master
Books, p. 158.
Response:
- Radiometric dating shows the earth to be 4.5 billion years old (see
CD010 regarding the reliability of
radiometric dating).
- If the earth is old, then radioactive isotopes with short half-lives
should have all decayed already. That is what we find. Isotopes with
half-lives longer than eighty million years are found on earth;
isotopes with shorter half-lives are not, the only exceptions being
those that are generated by current natural processes (Dalrymple 1991,
376-378).
- Loess deposits (deposits of wind-blown silt) in China are 300 m thick.
They give a continuous climate record for 7.2 million years. The
record is consistent with magnetostratigraphy and habitat type inferred
from fossils (Ding et al. n.d.; Russeau and Wu 1997; Sun et al. 1997).
- Varves are annual sediment layers that occur in large lakes.
They are straightforward to measure, cover millions of years, and
correlate well with other dating mechanisms.
- In seasonal areas, sedimentation rates vary across the year, so
sediments often show annual layers (varves) distinguished by texture
and/or composition. We can be confident that the layers are
seasonal because we see the same sorts of layers occurring today.
Even if they were not seasonal, the fineness of the sediments is
often such that each layer would require several days, at least, to
form. Some formations have millions of layers, such as the varve
record from Lake Baikal with five million annual layers (Williams et
al. 1997), and the 20,000,000 layers in the Green River formation.
They must have taken hundreds of thousands of years to form at the
very least.
- Dates obtained by counting annual layers of varves match dates obtained
from radiometric dating. One varve formation, covering 45,000
years, was used to calibrate carbon-14 dating using terrestrially
produced leaves, twigs, and insect parts that also appeared in the
sediments. The varves were easy to count because they included an
annual diatom bloom (Kitagawa and van der Plicht 1998).
- Varves record climate changes, too, since climate affects the amount of
sediments. Climate is affected by orbital cycles known to occur at
about 400,000-, 600,000-, and million-year periods (the so-called
Milankovitch cycles). Climate cycles of these durations occur in
the varve records. For example, Lake Baikal contains annual layers
from twelve million years ago to the present. These sediments
contain periodic changes matching the orbital cycles (Kashiwaya et
al. 2001).
- The abundance and distribution of helium change predictably as the sun
ages, converting hydrogen to helium in its core. These parameters also
affect how sound waves move through the sun. Thus one may estimate the
sun's age from seismic solar data. Such an analysis puts the age of
the sun at 4.66 billion years, plus or minus about 4 percent
(Dziembowski et al. 1999).
References:
- Dalrymple, G. Brent, 1991. The Age of the Earth. Stanford
University Press.
- Ding, Z. L. et al., n.d. Rearrangement of atmospheric circulation at
about 2.6 Ma over Northern China: Records of evidence from grain size
loess-red clay sequences.
http://fadr.msu.ru/inqua/nl-15/llz-abs.html#11
- Dziembowski, W.A., G. Fiorentini, B. Ricci and R. Sienkiewicz, 1999.
Helioseismology and the solar age. Astronomy and Astrophysics 343:
990-996. http://aa.springer.de/papers/9343003/2300990/small.htm
- Sun, D., J. Shaw, Z. An, M. Cheng and L. Yue, 1998.
Magnetostratigraphy and paleoclimatic interpretation of a continuous
7.2Ma Late Cenozoic eolian sediments from the Chinese Loess Plateau.
Geophysical Research Letters 25: 85-88.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/gap/DonghuaiS/DonghuaiS.html
- Kashiwaya, Kenji, S. Ochiai, H. Sakai and T. Kawai, 2001. Orbit-related
long-term climate cycles revealed in a 12-Myr continental record from
Lake Baikal. Nature 410: 71-74.
- Kitagawa, H. and J. van der Plicht, 1998. Atmospheric radiocarbon
calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: Late glacial fluctuations and cosmogenic
isotope production. Science 279: 1187-1190. See also Kitagawa,
H. and J. van der Plicht, 2000. PE-04. A 45.000 year varve chronology
from Japan. http://www.cio.phys.rug.nl/HTML-docs/Verslag/97/PE-04.htm
- Russeau, D.-.D. and Wu, N., 1997. A new molluscan record
of the monsoon variability over the past 130,000 yr in the
Luochuan loess sequence, China. Geology 25(3): 275-278.
- Williams, D. F., J. Peck, E. B. Karabanov, A. A. Prokopenko, V.
Kravchinsky, J. King, and M. I. Kuzmin, 1997. Lake Baikal record of
continental climate response to orbital insolation during the past 5
million years. Science 278: 1114-1117.
Further Reading:
Dalrymple, G. Brent, 1991. The Age of the Earth, Stanford, CA:
Stanford
University Press.
Strahler, Arthur N., 1987. Science and Earth History, Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus Books.
Young, Davis A., 1988. Christianity and the Age of the Earth.
Thousand
Oaks, CA: Artisan Sales.
created 2001-3-31, modified 2004-10-2