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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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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:

  1. Radiometric dating shows the earth to be 4.5 billion years old (see CD010 regarding the reliability of radiometric dating).

  2. 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).

  3. 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).

  4. 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.


  5. 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:

  1. Dalrymple, G. Brent, 1991. The Age of the Earth. Stanford University Press.
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
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created 2001-3-31, modified 2004-10-2