I have previously been a member of a YEC believing church but have been able to follow the evidence and change. However I think I can understand the problems for some believers. When you have invested a life-time of effort and means into the church, the idea that you might have been wrong all along could be too painful to contemplate, so you shut your ears to any disturbing evidence. You just take the line of some of the Creation websites and say any evidence that contradicts the Bible is false.
The Cariaco report is at Not Found and includes graphs. It seems to be anchored by C14 dating and ice-core comparison. The Wiki article on Carbon Dating mentions the plateau at 10,000 -11,000years. I did not record where I saw the referral to the 750-450 BC plateau, but it seems to show on your dendrochronology graph. The Cariaco article also mentions other plateaus in the record.
Thanks, I'll read through that this weekend and see what I can extract to add to the thread.
I have been looking at the reports of ice and deep-sea cores. There is an immense amount of information in them which would be very difficult to squeeze in to a YEC paradigm, including many more correlations.
The correlations with climate change are of interest to me for several reasons, one of which is the persistent YEC claim that climate could\would be different before the flood, so being able to show long term climate trends without extreme alterations would be evidence against this argument.
the idea that you might have been wrong all along could be too painful to contemplate, so you shut your ears to any disturbing evidence.
I think you've hit on part of the problem, but I think the reality is a bit more fundamental. I don't think YEC believers, in general, know much science to begin with. Some YECs even wear their ignorance as some kind of Christian merit badge. It is pretty easy to dismiss scientific examples, when you don't understand the nature of the evidence for them, particularly when the alternative is the destruction of your potentially eternal soul.
Quite frankly, the fundamental reason, in my opinion, is a failure of the very faith that YECs claim to have. In essence, YECs seem to believe that if a single part of the Bible cannot to be taken literally in the most extreme sense, that even their salvation through Jesus Christ cannot be correct. Yet no one would ever read any other work in quite the way a YEC reads the Bible.
I've heard pastors suggest that the Bible is the ultimate science text, and usually those pastors cite some passage of the Bible that can be stretched to match some scientific truth. Well I read the Bible cover to cover annually, and I've never seen anything that would allow me to determine the equations of motion for a Foucault pendulum using Lagrangian mechanics, so I generally simply ignore such claims.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
Hi RAZD. You may be interested in a report of a sea-core off Portugal which compares pollen records from varying advance and retreat of forests etc with temperature signals and comparison with ice-cores 185,000 to 345,000 years ago. It is at http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/...e/academic/k.roucoux/EPSL.pdf
Hi NoNukes, I have seen a range of YECs. Some would have trouble understanding the science. Some like some medicos I know are perfectly able to understand but reject and/or ignore it. Some know the science but their faith trumps it. I have always, or at least for a long time, believed that Truth can stand scrutiny, and it doesn't hold up it is not Truth. But this is probably getting off topic.
I have seen a range of YECs. Some would have trouble understanding the science. Some like some medicos I know are perfectly able to understand but reject and/or ignore it. Some know the science but their faith trumps it.
This would make a great topic for a new thread. I would start with a discussion of
Cognitive Dissonance
This is a powerful psychological block to accepting any information that contradicts firmly held beliefs.
You may be interested in a report of a sea-core off Portugal which compares pollen records from varying advance and retreat of forests etc with temperature signals and comparison with ice-cores 185,000 to 345,000 years ago. It is at School of Geography: 404
I'll look into that tomorrow (my study day this week) as well as your other reference. One thing I will be looking for is a good start to the core and well defined annual layers.
Hi RAZD, You will not find well defined annual layers at 145,000 years. I am only a beginner in this but what I have seen so far is annual layers can be counted in ice cores for a few tens of thousands of years, confirmed by C14 and other markers such as O18. In deeper layers O18 and Be10 changes can be seen in Milankovitch cycles and allow estimation of greater ages. The ice cores can be compared with similar O18 changes in sea-cores and speleothems which can yield higher RM dates. Amounts of CO2 included in the ice cores also varies with other temperature markers. I read that the Vostok core was dated by 5 different methods with agreement within a few thousand years, but the methods were not detailed. If someone else can give more details that would be good.
I am only a beginner in this but what I have seen so far is annual layers can be counted in ice cores for a few tens of thousands of years, confirmed by C14 and other markers such as O18. In deeper layers O18 and Be10 changes can be seen in Milankovitch cycles and allow estimation of greater ages. The ice cores can be compared with similar O18 changes in sea-cores and speleothems which can yield higher RM dates. Amounts of CO2 included in the ice cores also varies with other temperature markers. I read that the Vostok core was dated by 5 different methods with agreement within a few thousand years, but the methods were not detailed. If someone else can give more details that would be good.
I'll have to go back and recheck the ice core information, thanks.
A similar problem occurs with the Lake Suigetsu layers, and that is why I cut off the annual layers where I do, even though the core data extends much further.
One thing we can say about those extended cores is that they do not show a discontinuity in that data, a disruption of the process of layer formation, the introduction of completely foreign objects into the layer process (such as piles of dinosaur fossils).
Hi RAZD, The Greenland Ice core Counting Chronology 2005 is layer counted and unified for the DYE3, GRIP, and NGRIP cores and goes back 62,000 years. From carlsberggroup.com : Researchers studied 5,700 metres of ice from three Greenland cores. Annual layer counting involved 175,000 isotope measurements and more than a million measurements of chemical impurities in layers of ice less than 1 cm thick.
It makes you tired just reading about that much work, but shows the effort that is put into making the count as accurate as possible. A significant absence is evidence of the massive amount of volcanic activity that most Flood models involve.
A couple of items that are at least tangential to this thread and topic:
A paper by Burke and Robinson in the 3 Feb 2012 issue of Science has a plausible-sounding explanation for the "wiggle" in carbon-14 dating curves around 16,000 years ago - the Southern Ocean gave up a huge "burp" of C-14 depleted water that had been in the deeps there for a long while.
Abstract:
Changes in the upwelling and degassing of carbon from the Southern Ocean form one of the leading hypotheses for the cause of glacial-interglacial changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. We present a 25,000-year-long Southern Ocean radiocarbon record reconstructed from deep-sea corals, which shows radiocarbon-depleted waters during the glacial period and through the early deglaciation. This depletion and associated deep stratification disappeared by ~14.6 ka (thousand years ago), consistent with the transfer of carbon from the deep ocean to the surface ocean and atmosphere via a Southern Ocean ventilation event. Given this evidence for carbon exchange in the Southern Ocean, we show that existing deep-ocean radiocarbon records from the glacial period are sufficiently depleted to explain the ~190 per mil drop in atmospheric radiocarbon between ~17 and 14.5 ka.
And, a news piece in Nature on 16 Feb. tells of a recent paper in Physical Review Letters that describes a optical-spectroscopy way to measure carbon 14 at much lower levels than current methods can. This may well allow carbon dating further into the past, though folks will have to be even more vigilant about contamination than they are now. And the instrumentation is potentially far cheaper than accelerator mass spectrometers.
And, a news piece in Nature on 16 Feb. tells of a recent paper in Physical Review Letters that describes a optical-spectroscopy way to measure carbon 14 at much lower levels than current methods can. This may well allow carbon dating further into the past, though folks will have to be even more vigilant about contamination than they are now. And the instrumentation is potentially far cheaper than accelerator mass spectrometers.
I've been waiting for some breakthroughs in this field. Current AMS dates are $595 at Beta Analytic. If we could get some significant cost drop we could do a lot more samples. Additional accuracy would be a nice side benefit as well.
Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
I've been waiting for some breakthroughs in this field. Current AMS dates are $595 at Beta Analytic. If we could get some significant cost drop we could do a lot more samples. Additional accuracy would be a nice side benefit as well.
Indeed, think what doing more samples on the tree rings and other samples from annual varves etc would do for the calibration curves as well.
I've read through the Hughen et al paper on the Cariaco Basin varves, and it looks like it helps confirm the other data as suggested. I do still need to check with the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core data to see how it is anchored and correlated.
I would like to use this as another example with the other annual systems if I can, but if not then it certainly serves as a further correlation that needs to be explained -- ie how come does this set of data only match the other curves if the dates are correct, and why does it match the other data so completely if the dates are not correct.
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