Genesis Flood

 

MEASURABLE 14C IN FOSSILIZED ORGANIC MATERIALS: 
CONFIRMING THE YOUNG EARTH CREATION-FLOOD MODEL

   
 
Presented: Fifth International Conference on Creationism
August 4-8, 2003
Copyright 2003 by Creation Science Fellowship, Inc.
Pittsburgh, PA  USA - All Rights Reserved

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 1010 14C 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’

 

Item

14C/C (pmc) (±1 S.D.)

Material

Reference

1

       0.71±?*

Marble

Aerts-Bijma et al. [1]

2

       0.65±0.04

Shell

Beukens [8]      

3

       0.61±0.12

Foraminifera

Arnold et al. [2]

4

       0.60±0.04

Commercial graphite

Schmidt et al. [36]

5

       0.58±0.09

Foraminifera (Pyrgo murrhina)

Nadeau et al. [30]

6

       0.54±0.04

Calcite

Beukens [8]

7

       0.52±0.20

Shell (Spisula subtruncata)

Nadeau et al. [30]      

8

       0.52±0.04

Whale bone

Jull et al. [24]

9

       0.51±0.08

Marble

Gulliksen & Thomsen [21]

10

       0.5±0.1

Wood, 60 Ka

Gillespie & Hedges [19]

11

       0.46±0.03

Wood

Beukens [8]

12

       0.46±0.03

Wood

Vogel et al. [45]

13

       0.44±0.13

Anthracite

Vogel et al. [45]

14

       0.42±0.03

Anthracite

Grootes et al. [20]

15

       0.401±0.084

Foraminifera (untreated) 

Schleicher et al. [35]

16

       0.40±0.07

Shell (Turitella communis)

Nadeau et al. [30]

17

       0.383±0.045

Wood (charred)

Snelling [37]

18

       0.358±0.033

Anthracite

Beukens et al. [9]

19

       0.35±0.03

Shell (Varicorbula gibba)

Nadeau et al. [30]

20

       0.342±0.037

Wood

Beukens et al. [9]

21

       0.34±0.11

Recycled graphite

Arnold et al. [2]

22

       0.32±0.06

Foraminifera

Gulliksen & Thomsen [21]

23

       0.3±?   

Coke

Terrasi et al. [43]

24

       0.3±?  

Coal

Schleicher et al. [35]

25

       0.26±0.02

Marble

Schmidt et al. [36]

26

       0.2334±0.061  

Carbon powder

McNichol et al. [29]

27

       0.23±0.04

Foraminifera (mixed species avg.)

Nadeau et al. [30]

28

       0.211±0.018

Fossil wood

Beukens [8]

29

       0.21±0.02

Marble

Schmidt et al. [36]

30

       0.21±0.06

CO2

Grootes et al. [20]

31

       0.20–0.35* (range)

Anthracite

Aerts-Bijma et al. [1]

32

       0.20±0.04

Shell (Ostrea edulis)

Nadeau et al. [30]

33

       0.20±0.04

Shell (Pecten opercularis)

Nadeau et al. [30]

34

       0.2±0.1*

Calcite

Donahue et al. [15]

35

       0.198±0.060

Carbon powder

McNichol et al. [29]

36

       0.18±0.05 (range?)

Marble

Van der Borg et al. [44]

37

       0.18±0.03

Whale bone

Gulliksen & Thomsen [21]

38

       0.18±0.03

Calcite

Gulliksen & Thomsen [21]

39

       0.18±0.01**

Anthracite

Nelson et al. [32]