How reliable is science? new carbon dating problems (The limitations of science)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Tuesday, July 28, 2015, 05:19 (3405 days ago) @ David Turell

Tony
> > 1)Is age the ONLY way that layers are formed in the earth?
> > 2)How is that soil being tranferred into these layers? How is it being accumulated?
> > #Are layers uniform enough to be a reliable indicator of age? (like counting tree rings)
> > 4) How do you explain horizontal layers around vertical objects?
> 
>David: I'm no expert but did have a 10 days course on the Grand Canyon by as geology department head professor, who had about 40 papers on the Canyon. The lowest visible layer I saw and touched was the Vishnu Shist, 2.2 billion years old.-I bet that was fun!
> 
> 1) No, there are sudden lava flows, erosion (see below). Continental subduction can disrupt the layers. I've seen this on another river.-Subduction disrupts layers, and actually makes them rather unsuitable for calculating ages. I.e. What happens if a 1byo layer is subducted under 2byo? If we went according to radio metric dating, the layers would be younger the deaper you went. Similiarly, erosion removes layers as well as depositing them. Using the analogy of counting rings on a tree, it is like someone removed a couple of outer rings from one tree and wrapped them around another.-> 
> 2) Erosion by wind, water; earthquakes, ocean silting and volcanic ash eruptions are some of the things I can think of.
> -Flooding and silting are major ones because of the interesting things that happen when sediments are suspended in a liquid. For solids suspended in a liquid, they are sorted by boyancy/mass not by age, which further muddies the chronological record. Not only that, water in particular is horrible for radiometric dating because as it filters through a strata it both removes and deposits elements into the strata, making any assumption about the initial ratios a blind man's guess.-> 3) The layers are uniform enough to use as aging once ages are established at different levels. The Great Unconformity (750 million years not in the canyon) are elsewhere on the Earth, so the Earth in like an onion. The loss of the GU is thought to be due to erosion.
> 
> 4) The layers I've seen are much thicker than the height of a tree, and some layers have sub-layers. Certainly a tree could be fossilized in upright state. I looked at the website you referred to, and I know there are refuting articles, but I'm not educated enough to fully comment. -The layers may be thick enough, but like much of long time-line evolutionary theory (and yes, this portion of geology has deep ties with evolutionary theory), the problem is not the observation, but how the observation is incongruent with other observations. -Strata and Time: Probing the Gaps in Our Understanding
edited by D.G. Smith, R.J. Bailey, P.M. Burgess, A.J. Fraser pg.23-The problem is that it might take a couple of million years worth of sediment to bury a 12m tree, but the decay rate on said tree is likely no more than a few decades at maximum. Since fossilization requires rapid burial to prevent decomposition, unless there was some form of cataclysm that rapidly buried the tree, the tree would have decomposed long before it could ever have been fossilized. -This is also true of virtually ever fossil ever found. One probing question that no one bothers to ask:-How did this animal/plant/organism get burried rapidly enough for it to be fossilized?-
> David:I think it is hard to suggest the Earth in not 4.5 billion years old. And there is good evidence of biologic activity at 3.5 billion years and before with fossils in many layers all the way down.-
I am not suggesting any age for the Earth at all. As I said before, the age of the Earth is actually irrelevant to me. Whether it is 6000 or 4byo, it matters not. -Let me make something more clear for both you and DHW. I am not a young earth creationist. I don't particularly care if God created the Earth six thousand or four billion years ago. Which ever way he did it, I am sure he had good reason and I would love to understand what that reason is. What bothers me is that scientist ignore their own rules, logic, and discoveries in order to avoid painful, uncomfortable, or embarassing truths. -Organisms must be burried prior to decaying in order to be preserved. The fact that you have hundreds, or even thousands of fossils all in the same area, at the same geological strata indicates that they all died at the same time, and were buried in the same event. If they were not, then there is almost no chance at all that they would have ever became fossils. -When we look at the events that can move a volume of earth sufficiently large enough to bury trees and dinosaurs and the like, there aren't many.-A) Floods
B) Mudslides
C) Cave ins
D) Third party burials.-That's pretty much it. Nothing else moves enough earth rapidly enough to completely bury an organism without first destorying it. (Lava flows might bury an organism, but the chances are very high that the organism would be completely incenerated instead of being fossilized.)

--
What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.