JOHN BAUMGARDNER, PH.D. LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABRATORY*
D. RUSSELL HUMPHREYS, PH.D.INSTITUTE FOR CREATION RESEARCH*
ANDREW A. SNELLING, PH.D.INSTITUTE FOR CREATION RESEARCH*
STEVEN A. AUSTIN, PH.D.INSTITUTE FOR CREATION RESEARCH*

ABSTRACT

Given the short ¹⁴C half-life of 5730 years, organic materials purportedly older than 250,000 years, corresponding to 43.6 half-lives, should contain absolutely no detectable ¹⁴C. (One gram of modern carbon contains about 6 x 10^{10 14}C atoms, and 43.6 half-lives should reduce that number by a factor of 7.3 x 10^-14.)  An astonishing discovery made over the past twenty years is that, almost without exception, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, organic samples from every portion of the Phanerozoic record show detectable amounts of ¹⁴C!  ¹⁴C/C ratios from all but the youngest Phanerozoic samples appear to be clustered in the range 0.1-0.5 pmc (percent modern carbon), regardless of geological ‘age.’ A straightforward conclusion that can be drawn from these observations is that all but the very youngest Phanerozoic organic material was buried contemporaneously much less than 250,000 years ago.  This is consistent with the Biblical account of a global Flood that destroyed most of the air-breathing life on the planet in a single brief cataclysm only a few thousand years ago.

INTRODUCTION

Giem [18] reviewed the literature and tabulated about seventy reported AMS measurements of ¹⁴C in organic materials from the geologic record that, according to the conventional geologic time-scale, should be ¹⁴C ‘dead.’  The surprising result is that organic samples from every portion of the Phanerozoic record show detectable amounts of ¹⁴C.  For the measurements considered most reliable, the ¹⁴C/C ratios appear to fall in the range 0.1-0.5 percent of the modern ¹⁴C/C ratio (percent modern carbon, or pmc).  Giem demonstrates instrument error can be eliminated as an explanation on experimental grounds.  He shows contamination of the ¹⁴C-bearing fossil material in situ is unlikely but theoretically possible and is a testable hypothesis, while contamination during sample preparation is a genuine problem but largely solved by two decades of improvement in laboratory procedures.  He concludes the ¹⁴C detected in these samples most likely is from the organisms from which the samples are derived.  Moreover, because most fossil carbon seems to have roughly the same ¹⁴C/C ratio, Giem deems it plausible that all these organisms resided on earth at the same time.

Anomalous ¹⁴C in fossil material actually has been reported from the earliest days of radiocarbon dating.  Whitelaw [46], for example, surveyed all the dates reported in the journal Radiocarbon up to 1970, and he commented that for all of the over 15,000 specimens reported, "All such matter is found datable within 50,000 years as published."  The specimens included coal, oil, natural gas, and other allegedly ancient material.  The reason these anomalies were not taken seriously is because the older beta-decay counting technique had difficulty distinguishing genuine low levels of ¹⁴C in the samples from background counts due to cosmic rays.  The AMS method, besides its inherently greater sensitivity, does not have this complication of spurious counts due to cosmic rays.  In retrospect, it is likely that many of the beta-counting analyses were indeed truly detecting intrinsic ¹⁴C.

Measurable ¹⁴C in pre-Flood organic materials fossilized in Flood strata therefore appears to represent a powerful and testable confirmation of the young earth Creation-Flood model.  It was on this basis that Snelling [37-41] analyzed the ¹⁴C content of fossilized wood conventionally regarded as ¹⁴C ‘dead’ because it was derived from Tertiary, Mesozoic, and upper Paleozoic strata having conventional radioisotope ages of 40 to 250 million years.  All samples were analyzed using AMS technology by a reputable commercial laboratory with some duplicate samples also tested by a specialist laboratory in a major research institute.  Measurable ¹⁴C was obtained in all cases.  Values ranged from 7.58+1.11 pmc for a lower Jurassic sample to 0.38+0.04 pmc for a middle Tertiary sample (corresponding to ¹⁴C ‘ages’ of 20,700+1200 to 44,700+950 years BP, respectively).  The d¹³C values for the samples clustered around –25‰, as expected for organic carbon in plants and wood.  The ¹⁴C measured in these fossilized wood samples does not conform to a simple pattern, however, such as constant or decreasing with increasing depth in the geologic record (increasing conventional age).  On the contrary, the middle Tertiary sample yielded the least ¹⁴C, while the Mesozoic and upper Paleozoic samples did not contain similar ¹⁴C levels as might be expected if these represent pre-Flood trees.  The issue then of how uniformly the ¹⁴C may have been distributed in the pre-Flood world we concluded would likely be an important one.  Therefore, our RATE team decided to undertake further ¹⁴C analyses on a new set of samples to address this issue as well as to confirm the remarkable ¹⁴C levels reported in the radiocarbon literature for Phanerozoic material.

¹⁴C MEASURED IN SAMPLES CONVENTIONALLY DATED OLDER THAN 100,000 YEARS

Giem [18] compiled a long list of AMS measurements made on samples that, based on their conventional geological age, should be ¹⁴C ‘dead.’  These measurements were performed in many different laboratories around the world and reported in the standard peer-reviewed literature, mostly in the journals Radiocarbon and Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B.  Despite the fact that the conventional uniformitarian age for these samples is well beyond 100,000 years (in most cases it is tens to hundreds of millions of years), it is helpful nonetheless to be able to translate ¹⁴C/C ratios into the equivalent uniformitarian ¹⁴C age under the standard uniformitarian assumptions of an approximately constant ¹⁴C production rate and an approximately constant biospheric carbon inventory, extrapolated into the indefinite past.  This conversion is given by the simple formula, pmc = 100 x 2^–t/5730, where t is the time in years.  Applying this formula, one obtains values of 0.79 pmc for t = 40,000 years, 0.24 for t = 50,000 years, 0.070 pmc for 60,000 years, 0.011 pmc for 75,000 years, and .001 pmc for 95,000 years, as shown in graphical form in Figure 1.    

Figure 1.  Uniformitarian age as a function of 14C/C ratio in percent modern carbon.  The uniformitarian approach for interpreting the 14C data assumes a constant 14C production rate and a constant biospheric carbon inventory extrapolated into the indefinite past.  It does not account for the possibility of a recent global catastrophe that removed a large quantity of carbon from the biospheric inventory.

Table 1 below contains most of Giem’s [18] data plus data from some more recent papers.  Included in the list are a number of samples from Precambrian, that is, what we consider non-organic pre-Flood settings.  Most of the graphite samples with ¹⁴C/C values below 0.05 pmc are in this category. 

 TABLE 1. AMS Measurements on Samples Conventionally Deemed ¹⁴C ‘Dead’