Re: a guide to dating - 14C

Stephen Jones (sjones@iinet.com.au)
Thu, 21 Sep 95 21:24:04 EDT

Joe

On Mon, 18 Sep 95 10:10:42 EDT you wrote:

[...]

>The answer is the that half-life of C-14 is relatively short
>(5730 years) compared to these large ages. Due to the exponential
>nature of radioactive decay, once the material has gone thru 10 -
>20 half lives, the decay curve is essentially flat and
>asymptotically approaching zero. Thus estimations of ages greater
>than 50 -100 thousand years are inaccurate to the point of being
>meaningless. Other radioactive materials with much longer
>half-lives must be used to date material thought to be older than
>this in order to have any hope of credible results.

Thanks. I posted a message to Glenn querying in passing how the
dates for early man within Glenn's 5.5 million years were obtained.

I can accept (after much debate on the Australian Fidonet Creation v
Evolution echo) that science can date age of the Earth at 4.6 billion
years, using the Uranium-Lead method. However, I am not so sure
that it can date using such short ages as 5 MY using the U-Pb
method. Does anyone know what method was used to date Glenn's
exhibits?

Regards.

Stephen

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