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| ‘Ancient’ rock with an embedded ‘recent’ piece of wood. |
DATING ROCKS – SOME PROBLEMS
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| ‘Ancient’ rock with an embedded ‘recent’ piece of wood. |
What about the more recent methods of dating rocks, using radio-isotopes? Do they confirm the previously estimated ages? The answer is that very few rocks can be dated by this method and in those that are suitable, the results are open to considerable criticism. As one writer says: ‘Radioactive dating techniques are far less reliable than were previously thought.’ 28 Just one example - the Hawaiian volcano was known to be only 190 years old, but when dated by the Potassium -Argon method gave a result of up to three billion years old! 29
Doubt is thrown on these dating methods especially on the numerous occasions when ‘old’ rock contains ‘young’ material. The picture shows a block of pure sandstone. It is part of a bed in Australia hundreds of feet thick and extending over hundreds of square miles. Geologists date the formation of the whole of this bed of sandstone at between 230 and 255 million years ago. But embedded in this stone – and clearly it had always been there – is a block of wood. When this wood was dated by a radiocarbon method, it gave an estimated age of not millions of years, but merely thousands of years. Dating methods are clearly suspect!
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Another assumption is that rocks take immense ages to form. In the case of sedimentary rocks (the ones with fossils) they were obviously once muddy or sandy deposits, in which were trapped living things. Did it take long ages for them to turn to rock? Not necessarily. There have been several recent examples of rapid rock formation. A perfectly normal rock was dredged up from the site of a one hundred and fifty-year-old wreck and firmly embedded in it – in a similar way that animal fossils are – was a glass wine bottle (see picture). Clearly this rock was not millions of years old.30
References
28 R. Milton: page 44.
29 Funkhouser and Naughton: 1968. (Quoted by Milton pages 65,66).
30 From the
wreck of HMS Birkenhead, displayed in the South African Maritime Museum.