How old is the Earth?!

Most of your post has been dealth with adequately. One more comment: This is a flat-out lie. In a very few cases dates from recent lava flows have come back excessively large, and there are no such cases that are not explained.Most of such cases that were generated by creationists are explained by improper sample selection. I wonder why a supposedly knowledgeable geologist selects samples so obviously wrong ... it couldn't be so as to cheat, could it?

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Helium does not escape into the atmosphere.

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Having once been involve in planetary science, in fact this very field, called aeronomy, let me assure you that the physics involved in helium escape is not very complex, nor are the calculations. The results conform very well with the atmospheric composition we measure.

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Hydrogen does (which is how oxygen is made in the atmosphere, by UV hitting water vapor and splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen),

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Simple awful. Oxygen is too reactive and would react with the surface minerals too quicky for such a slow process like photodissociation of water to supply the current amount of oxygen. The oxygen in the atmosphere is supplied by photosynthesis by plants.

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helium is a lot heavier than hydrogen.

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A fly is a lot heavier than a mosquito, but both are still pretty light. The fact is, helium is the second lightest element.

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Give me some articles which show that helium escapes into space faster than it enters our atmosphere from interplanetary gas.

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CE001: Not Enough Helium?Incidentally, the greatest source of helium in the atmosphere is from alpha-decay of radioactive elements in the earth.Yeah, I know that this post has been responded to, but I just have to state my own opinion on this sort of nonsense. Please forgive me if I offend you, but these statements really indicate a real ignorance on your part about basic science. I haven't read too many of your posts - I will assume that you were fed these by less than reputable sources. I assure you that sources that put this kind of crap are inexcusably dishonest. Either they are knowingly telling lies, or they are disseminating "information" without ever checkin their "facts".

And then there's the mystery of how glaciers originally formed.------------------
-chris[This message has been edited by messenjaH, 11-22-2003]

Uh, Messenjah, would you care to elaborate on that? Exactly how is it relavant to the discussion? Does the Bible tell you how they formed? In fact, is there a hint that any of the writers even knew they existed?Why do the formation of the glaciers have anything to do with the age of the earth? (be careful here, you should not have brought this up, they offer ways to show that 6,000 years is NOT enough time to form them)[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 11-22-2003]

They formed because less ice melted in the summer than fell as snow the previous winter. For many years in a row. Mystery solved. Back to your regularly scheduled topic....

Bump!It does appear we have a number of young earth creationists around. Since I would say that the age of the earth is one very fundamental point in the debate between the two camps perhaps one or more of you young earthers would care to show how they determine the age of the earth.

Well duh, I mean something else but I seem to have forgotten------------------
-chris

I meant to speak of the mystery of how the earth's temperature and climate changed so drastically to form these glaciers and to begin glaciation. How the snow/ice was able to not melt away and slowly accumulate over a long period of time. Something had to cause these environmental changes for glaciers to form and for the process of glaciation to begin. It is one of earth sciences mysteries. I would follow up with the catalyst for these environmental changes could very well be a great flood.PEACE BE WITH YOU
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-chris[This message has been edited by messenjaH, 11-26-2003]

Unfortunatly, Messenjah, there is no mechanism that a 'great flood' could produce the glaciation. In fact, if you head off to the thread on that topic you will find that the creationists ideas of how the great flood unfolded would have boiled the earth's surface. We would, I'm guessing, still have been cooling off by the time of Christ.It is also no good trying to suggest that the glaciers are a result of the flood when creationists themselves discovered a long, long time ago that the flood didn't happen. So whatever the so called mystery of the glaciation is we know it wasn't the 'great flood'.You can guess away all you want. That is the kind of approach used frequently by the so called creation "scientists". However, all that will happen is that ugly facts will be thrown in your face and leave you haveing to make up more and more wild stories. Don't say you weren't warned.Another suggestion, don't start up something new untill you have finished with other points you have raised. You have, if my memory hasn't short circuited again, suggested that radiometric dating is wrong. If so you might want to finish with that before you start on glaciers.

How would a great flood "boil" the earth?PEACE BE WITH YOU------------------
-chris

messy, what is the mystery with glaciers? Glaciers are still forming today. They appear to be retreating in some locations because they are melting / breaking up at a faster rate than the glazier is moving from its source.The process was succinctly described by coragyps.If you rely on religious texts for your science then a great many things will be mysteries to you.

There is a huge amount of discussion on that topic.You can look here and read around in this thread.
EvC Forum: Geomagnetism and the rate of Sea-floor Spreadinghere's a bit more discussion about the flood
EvC Forum: Carbon Dating DOESN'T work beyond 4500 yearsand here
EvC Forum: Wegener and Evidence for Continental DriftThe problem is that it is hard to nail down just what a great flood would do since, like some other things, each creationist seems to make up a new idea about it as they go along.Perhaps you could give you 'official' creation "science" explanation for the flood. Then we can have fun tearing it into little tiny pieces.Note that the heat problem is just one of the many things which demonstrate that the flood did *not* happen. The creation geologists of a couple of centuries ago recognized the problems and gave up the flood model because of them.

The mystery with glaciers isn't how they form but how the conditions on earth change that allows for them to form in over large areas and then change back again.There are a number of ideas regarding this but I don't know all that much about it. The point at present is that the 'great flood' idea in not one which can explain anything since there is ample evidence falsifying it.

All the ideas that have been proposed for the source of the water or changes in the Earth's topography (other than the idea of God making it appear miraculously) involve the release of so much energy in the form of heat that "boiling" is an inadequate term. Venus would be Antarctica by comparison, and essentially all life on Earth would be destroyed (maybe a few bacteria would survive). Vapor canopy, ice canopy, ice asteroid impact, water released from below, catastrophic plate tectonics, rapid mountain bulding ... all of them release enough heat to destroy life several times over."Scientific" creationists don't want to say it was a miracle; if they did they would have to give up the pretense that they're scientific. So they mumble and dissemble a lot when the subject comes up. Any proposal for the source of the water must include a calculation of the heat involved, and that calculation must be both performed and reviewed by experts, or the proposal is meaningless.See, for example, Water and Vapor and Noah's Flood.

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....if you head off to the thread on that topic you will find that the creationists ideas of how the great flood unfolded would have boiled the earth's surface.

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Imo, nobody's proven this to be true. There's other theories to show that pre flood canopy would've created the perfect weather world wide.