14C Calibration and Correlations

Hmmmm.... I would like that more people gave their opinion of this. I will read the posts in the other debates, but I would really wish if you could give explanations for this.

Does your site speak of the reservoir effect? That's where organisms feed on a "reservoir" of "old carbon", which affects the C14 levels in their bodies, making them test as being much older than they are. The seal that RAZD refers to is one such case, as are the fresh-water molluscs that I know your site mentions as an example.Does your site describe where C14 comes from? From the atmosphere. So plants exposed to air take that C14 in and incorporates it into their tissues. And herbevores who eat those plants similiarly incorporate that C14 into their tissues, as do the carnivores who eat them. But when an animal's food chain, such as that aforementioned seal's, derived its carbon from ancient sources deep underwater with no access to the fresh C14 in the atmosphere, you have one example of the reservoir effect.When I first encountered creationist claims over 40 years ago, one of the first two claims was about those fresh-water molluscs. I was skeptical, but what really showed me that creationism is false was the second claim about the NASA computer that found Joshua's Lost Day, which claimed capabilities for computers that even in 1970 we knew to be flagrantly false. Later, I found a reference for that claim and I looked it up in the library. In fact, your site provides that reference, so you should also go to the library and look it up. Have you? I didn't think so. It turns out that that stream was fed by an underground spring that fed through limestone. Do you know what limestone is? It's ancient shells and is loaded with carbon. Ancient carbon. Those fresh-water clams had practically no direct exposure to the new C14 in the atmosphere, but rather to the ancient carbon from the dissolved limestone whose C14 was depleted. And as a result of that reservoir effect, they falsely tested to be very old.This information is very well known to those who have bothered to learn about radio-carbon dating. So why is it such a mystery to creationists?Also, your site says that ideally the theoretical maximum age detectable by radio-carbon dating should be 100,000 years. But in practical application, the upper limit is more like 50,000 years. The "ages" of those dinosaur fossils are in accordance with this practical limit and are the result of using the wrong scale to measure something -- if you try to use an indestructable bathroom scale that has an upper limit of 400 lb to weigh a dump truck, then it will report that dump truck to weigh only 400 pounds. Duh?Read those other threads, because this and a lot more is explained by people who actually use the method and have studied the details of it at a university science level.Edited by dwise1, : qualified "details" at the end

Perhaps you could post one of the claims you are interested in discussing?
That web page contains very few definite claims that relate to the accuracy of dating methods.
Instead it is full of innuendo.e.g.

quote:

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How can this be? There are several possibilities as outlined below. They are the following.

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1. Carbon 14 from the surrounding environment have been introduced into the sample. This could happen from ground water washing in or bacteria invading a sample. A hard non porous carbon material such as diamond, hard coal, or amber would make this unlikely and can be ruled out for those materials.
2. The carbon 14 lab has used materials in its processing that contain carbon 14. Perhaps the sample holder had some carbon in it.
3. Contamination during sample preparation. This is something all labs are aware of and make great efforts to avoid this problem.
4. Error due to the machine performing and measuring results. This is not likely given the extreme care given to these many experiments by numerous people over a span of 50 years.
5. Nuclear synthesis of carbon 14 in situ during the experiment. This has been ruled out by experts.
6. Nuclear synthesis of carbon 14 in the coal or marble itself while laying in the ground for alleged millions of years. This has been ruled out by experts as well.
7. Nuclear synthesis of ordinary carbon to carbon 14 while the material is in situ. In other words could the carbon material while buried, frozen or whatever be lying next to or exposed to a strong radioactive material that bombarded the carbon atoms and turned some of them into carbon 14 from carbon 16.
8. There actually is carbon 14 in the sample being tested and the dating scheme that claims the material is 100 million years old is itself badly flawed and needs to be reexamined. The carbon 14 testing method does give a more correct and more reliable age than any other method known.

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So...which explanation do they think is correct?
The tone of the article implies no.8 - but they don't explicitly say.
They don't offer any explanation for why the others are wrong either.I think they are relying on the fact that if you throw enough shit sophistry around, some of it will stick.

I use C14 dating a lot in my work, and have studied the method for about 40 years. I have found that the claims pushed by creationists are nonsense.If you can present some specific questions, I'll be happy to help out.As your link mentioned dinosaurs and diamonds, let me address those.When the laboratories are measuring C14, they are dealing with incredibly small amounts. C14 is found in the atmosphere in about 1 part per trillion! Can you imagine how easy it is to contaminate a sample that starts at 1 part per trillion and gets smaller and smaller from there?Groundwater is enough to contaminate dinosaur fossils! That can bring the readings of >50,000 or so down to 35,000 or so, or even less. Breathing on a sample with inherently no C14, such as a dinosaur fossil, which isn't then properly pretreated, can do the same. Creationists are not very good at submitting clean samples because they want their samples to be as contaminated as possible! That's the only way they can support a young earth.Taylor's experiment with diamonds was designed to find out how much of a C14 signal could be produced using a sample that contained absolutely no C14. The "signal" in that experiment came from the interior of the equipment! And it was very small.But these are the kinds of results that creation "scientists" are jumping on as absolute proof of a young earth. Their claims amount to nothing more than lies. Even the RATE group, with over a million dollars in creationist funds, could not show that C14 dating and other forms of radiometric dating were inherently inaccurate. Take a look at the following link for more details.Assessing the RATE ProjectAnyway, if you have any specific questions please post them. I have collected, submitted, and interpreted about 600 samples in a 40 year career as an archaeologist, and I have both written and lectured on the C14 process. Another poster here is very much more qualified to answer questions on the technical end of things. Several others are also pretty familiar with C14 dating. I would doubt that you could ask a question, relying on information from a creationist website, that couldn't be adequately answered.

Hi CoolBeansFirst sentence in the source you provided: This is completely and utterly untrue. For example, you can't use carbon dating to date diamonds at all; the simple reason being that carbon dating can only work on the remains of organisms. Organisms that could breath. I've never seen a breathing diamond.Carbon dating certainly won't work on 'anything with carbon', at all.Thus, just reading the first sentence from your source, I came to the following conclusions about the authors of the source you provided:
1. The authors of your source deliberately lied to you, and/or
2. The authors of your source are clowns who pretend that they know something about carbon dating, and/or
3. The authors of your source material are creationists.Without reading the rest, I can predict that the authors of your source material do and are all of the above. Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.Edited by Pressie, : Spelling and changed a sentenceEdited by Pressie, : No reason given.

I would like you to adress the carbon 14 in the dinosuar fossils. Thats all it matters to me.

They dont. What they are doing is trying to rule out other explanations. Its against critics.

I think that their point is that there is carbon in it.

What are you actually responding to? I do not see how this post relates to the one you are responding to.Use peek to see how I did the quote box above.

Hi CoolBeans Presumably you now have a lot more opinions as well as comments based on actual facts.To get into more depth you need to point out what parts of that creationist article you find most compelling.I will note that of the following:

quote:

---

How can this be? There are several possibilities as outlined below. They are the following.

​

1. Carbon 14 from the surrounding environment have been introduced into the sample. This could happen from ground water washing in or bacteria invading a sample. A hard non porous carbon material such as diamond, hard coal, or amber would make this unlikely and can be ruled out for those materials.
2. The carbon 14 lab has used materials in its processing that contain carbon 14. Perhaps the sample holder had some carbon in it.
3. Contamination during sample preparation. This is something all labs are aware of and make great efforts to avoid this problem.
4. Error due to the machine performing and measuring results. This is not likely given the extreme care given to these many experiments by numerous people over a span of 50 years.
5. Nuclear synthesis of carbon 14 in situ during the experiment. This has been ruled out by experts.
6. Nuclear synthesis of carbon 14 in the coal or marble itself while laying in the ground for alleged millions of years. This has been ruled out by experts as well.
7. Nuclear synthesis of ordinary carbon to carbon 14 while the material is in situ. In other words could the carbon material while buried, frozen or whatever be lying next to or exposed to a strong radioactive material that bombarded the carbon atoms and turned some of them into carbon 14 from carbon 16.
8. There actually is carbon 14 in the sample being tested and the dating scheme that claims the material is 100 million years old is itself badly flawed and needs to be reexamined. The carbon 14 testing method does give a more correct and more reliable age than any other method known.

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Numbers 6, and 7 skirt around the fact that when you have a measurable amount of 14C in coal (or oil or diamonds), that it correlates with proximity to radiation (from uranium etc), rather than age, and that rather than being "ruled out by experts" this has been confirmed by experts.Part of the misinformation is that "ordinary carbon" -- 12C not 16C btw -- is not what is turned into 14C, but 14N (the product of 14 decay by beta particle decay) and some from 13C by neutron capture. Note that 14C is being formed inside nuclear reactors as actual evidence of radiation caused 14C.... so saying that turning 16C into 14C is "ruled out by experts" is like saying that turning lead into gold has been " "ruled out by experts" -- it's misdirection, misinformation, designed to look like a real argument when in fact it is bogus.btw -- notice that "experts" are not identified, nor is their work cited, a common warning signal that what they are saying is bogus.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : clrtyEdited by RAZD, : ..Edited by RAZD, : ...

The discovery of collagen in a Tyrannosaurus-Rex dinosaur femur bone was recently reported in the journal SCIENCE. This is an outstanding find because collagen being a soft tissue present in most animals is supposed to decay in a few thousand years. Collagen is the main protein found in connective tissue of animals. It can make up as much as 1 to 6 percent of muscle mass. Recently Triceratops and Hadrosaur femur bones in excellent condition were discovered in Glendive Montana and our group received permission to saw them in half and collect samples for Carbon 14 testing. Both bones were tested by a licensed lab for presence of collagen. Both bones did in fact contain some collagen! The best process ( Accelerator Mass Spectrometry ) was used. Total organic carbon and dinosaur bio-apatite was then extracted and pretreated to remove potential contaminants and concordant radiocarbon dates were obtained, all of which were similar to radiocarbon dates for ice age megafauna such as Siberian mammoths, saber tooth tigers of the Los Angeles LaBrea Tarpits, sloth dung and giant bison. We generally go with AMS dating because of its inherent superior accuracy but use the conventional method when large samples are available to completely rule out contamination. This is recommended by the professional carbon dating laboratory specialists.I would also like to post there results of carbon dating those fossils but I cant do it.

This is an example of a PRATT, or Point Refuted A Thousand Times. This argument has been bandied about on this site for many years and explanations have already been put forth. If the instance you are speaking of is the T-Rex discovered by Mary Schweitzer than you are missing the portion that these fibers had been fossilized. The fibrous tissue had been rehydrated during the process that removes minerals from bone... SourceAnother thought that is being talked about is that it is because of the structure of collagen that the tendrils in the innermost part can escape fossilization for millions of years. Collagen is comprised of many different tendrils all bundled together, similar to a braided rope with thousands of braids. This could allow for the innermost braids of collagen to avoid the fossilization process. And of the 11 strands of collagen tested from a fossil it was determined that all of the strands came from the innermost portion of the larger braid. SourceABE - I also forgot to ask, why were they searching for atmospheric carbon in a fossibl well beyond the range of the test.Carbon testing of 10,000 year old bone = 10,000
Carbon testing of a 30,000 year old bone = 30,000
Carbon testing of a 50,000 year old bone = 50,000
Carbon testing of a 100,000 year old bone = 50,000andCarbon testing of fossil dinosaur millions of years old = 50,000...
...
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You can't keep counting up past the length of your ruler. And the ruler for Carbon-14 stops at 50,000.Edited by Tempe 12ft Chicken, : No reason given.

And so they are lying to you. That lie has already been pointed out to you. Why are you clinging to their lie?The preponderance of C14 is produced in the upper atmosphere. The use of C14 in radio-carbon dating is based on that atmospheric C14 being incorporating into organic tissue, as I explicitly described to you! The method does not work when the organism's source of carbon has not had access to the atmosphere for a very long time (eg, food-chain based on deep-sea sources, dissolved limestone) and hence is well known to not be appropriate candidates for carbon-dating.That your page cites such inappropriate cases as appropriate and hence proof against the method does nothing but demonstrate their blatant dishonesty and their desire to deceive. And since they are lying and deceiving in service of their god whom they personify as The Truth incarnate, we must yet again ask what "True Christian" doctrine is on lying and deceiving in service of their god.

But they don't rule out other explanations.As I said: be specific about what you want to discuss.
Then we can discuss it.

Well they are yecs.....