Re: [asa] Denver RATE Conference (Thousands...Not Billions)_Part 2

David Campbell wrote in response to Jon Tandy ...
(http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200709/0616.html)

>> On another subject, does anyone has any technical response
>> to Baumgardner's comment on the "excess carbon may have
>> diluted the C14 in the pre-flood world such that the initial C14/C12
>> ratio would be a lot smaller; perhaps by a factor of 100 - 500
>> times" ? This sounds to me like pure hand-waving, like "theory"
>> in the common sense of "speculation" rather than the scientific
>> sense of the word, simply to make a rhetorical argument that
>> agrees with what the audience wants to hear, i.e., that a 5000 year
>> old earth might have some scientific plausibility. Does anyone
>> know what he's talking about, and what (if any) basis it has in fact
>> or evidence?
>
> This would work only if the excess carbon was supplied by a
> source depleted in 14C, e.g., a large reservoir of carbon that
> was over 50000 years old at the time.

Excellent point. As I understood it, Baumgardner inferred that the
original primordial carbon was essentially carbon 'dead' at Creation.
Therefore in his scenario, all of the C14 before the flood had been formed
by atmospheric processes between Creation & the Flood. This, however,
ignores their own proposal that there was a tremendous amount of
accelerated nuclear decay ('AND') during the first part of the creation
week. This 'AND' would have produced a huge flux of neutrons that would
have reacted with any available nitrogen-14 to produce a lot of C14. Using
their proposal, I would predict that C14 rates would be higher before the
Flood.

During the Flood, the RATE team is also proposing more 'AND'. (One of the
reasons that RATE believes that pre-Flood C14 concentrations were low is
because Noah obviously survived the flood without radiation poisoning from
the accelerated C14 decay in the ark and in his body.) This 'AND' and
accompanying thermal neutron flux may be the reason why they think that
the 50,000-year-old pre-Flood carbon reservoir changed to a 5,000-year-old
carbon reservoir after the flood. Alternatively they may be proposing
that the post flood C14 level is all atmospheric and corresponds to our
modern initial C14/C12 ratio expectations. This jump in ages was never
addressed well during his talk. The obvious problem that this change
from pre-Flood to post-Flood carbon ratios brings up (regardless of the
mechanism) is ... Why do we see a large number of C14 dates between 5,000
& 50,000 years old? This break should be obvious in the C14 dates. Yet,
radiocarbon geochronologists, working together with dendrochronologists
(tree ring experts) have constructed a C14 calibration curve going back at
least 10,000 years. No breaks or strange tree rings have been seen in
these records after 5,000 years.

Steve
(Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are my own and are not to be
attributed to my employer ... or anyone else.)
_____________
 Steven M. Smith, Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey
 Box 25046, M.S. 973, DFC, Denver, CO 80225
 Office: (303)236-1192, Fax: (303)236-3200
 Email: smsmith@usgs.gov
 -USGS Nat'l Geochem. Database NURE HSSR Web Site-
  http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1997/ofr-97-0492/

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Received on Fri Sep 28 15:39:41 2007