Critics found that Dr. Austin chose a dating technique that is inappropriate for the sample tested, and charged that he deliberately used the wrong experiment in order to promote the idea that science fails to show that the Earth is older than the Bible claims. Yet the experiment remains as one of the cornerstones of the Young Earth movement. Of most people who have heard of this incident before, that's probably about the total depth of what they've heard.
And there's pretty good reason for this: Geology dating is pretty complicated, and if you look at Dr. Austin's paper or at any scholarly criticism of it, your eyes will quickly glaze over from the extraordinary detail and intricacy. So I thought this would be a great place to point Skeptoid's skeptical eye, and see how much of the chaff we can cut through to see what the bare facts of the case really are.
Obviously both sides of this debate have agendas to promote, and that means that any summary you're likely to read was probably motivated by one agenda or the other. Let's begin with a basic understanding of the radiometric dating technique used, K-Ar, or potassium-argon. This dating technique depends on the fact that the radioactive isotope of potassium, 40 K, naturally decays into other elements, as do all unstable radioactive elements. There are two ways that this happens to 40 K. About 89 percent of the time, a neutron inside the 40 K undergoes beta decay, in which the neutron decays into a proton and an electron.
This gain of a proton turns the potassium into calcium.
References & Further Reading
But about 11 percent of the time, an extra proton inside the 40 K captures one of its electrons and merges with it, turning the proton into a neutron and a neutrino, and converting the potassium into argon. In both events, the atomic mass remains unchanged, but the number of protons changes, thus turning the element from one to another. This happens to 40 K everywhere in the universe that it exists, and at the same rate, which is a half-life of 1. This means that if you have atoms of 40 K, 1.
You'll also have 83 argon atoms, and calcium atoms. If I take a sample and measure an argon to potassium ratio of However, all of these numbers are probabilities, not absolutes. You need to have a statistically meaningful amount of argon before your result would be considered significant. Below about 10, years , potassium-argon results are not significant; there's not yet enough argon created. In addition, the initial amount of 40 K that you started with is never measured directly; instead, it is assumed to always be.
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This has a standard deviation, so it also contributes to the margin of error. So when my result says the sample was 2. The bell curve of probable age starts at about 1. So whether you call it an exact science or not is a matter of linguistics.
How Old Is the Mount St. Helens Lava Dome?
Although the exact age can't be known, the probabilities can be exactly calculated. Austin's sample was known to have solidified in , its argon content was clearly well below the threshhold where an amount of argon sufficiently useful for dating could have been present. And even that threshhold applies to only the most sensitive detection equipment.
Potassium-argon dating is done by destructively crushing and heating the sample and spectrally analyzing the resulting gases. The equipment in use at the time at the lab employed by Dr. Austin, Geocron Laboratories , was of a type sensitive enough to only detect higher concentrations of argon gas. Geocron clearly stated that their equipment was only capable of accurate results when the sample contained a concentration of argon high enough to be consistent with 2,, years or older.
And so, by any standard, it was scientifically meaningless for Dr. Austin to apply Geocron's potassium-argon dating to his sample of dacite known to be only six years old. But let's ask the obvious question. If there wasn't yet enough argon in the rock to be detectable, and the equipment that was used was not sensitive enough to detect any argon, how was enough argon found that such old results were returned?
There are two possible reasons that the old dates were returned.
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The first has to do with the reason Geocron's equipment was considered useful only for high concentrations of argon. There would always be a certain amount of argon inside the mass spectrometer left over from previous experiments.
If the sample being tested is old enough to have significant argon, this leftover contamination would be statistically insignificant; so this was OK for Geocron's normal purposes. But for a sample with little or no argon, it would produce a falsely old result. This was undoubtedly a factor in Dr. The second possibility is that so-called "excess argon" could have become trapped in the Mount St. This is where we find the bulk of the confusing complexity in Austin's paper and in those of his critics. The papers all go into great detail describing the various ways that argon-containing compounds can be incorporated into magma.
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These include the occlusion of xenoliths and xenocrysts, which are basically contaminants from existing old rocks that get mixed in with the magma; and phenocrysts, which are crystals of all sorts of different minerals that form inside the rock in different ways depending on how quickly the magma cools. Page after page of chemical compositions, mineral breakdowns, charts and graphs, and all sorts of discussion of practically every last molecule found in the Mount St. Summarizing both arguments, Dr. Austin claims that xenoliths and xenocrysts were completely removed from the samples before testing, and that the wrong results are due to phenocrysts, which form to varying degrees in all magma, and thus effectively cast doubt on all potassium-argon testing done throughout the world.
It's important to note that his arguments are cogent and are based on sound geology, and are often mischaracterized by skeptics. He did not simply use the wrong kind of radiometric dating as an ignorant blunder.
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