https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/earth-sciences/what-is-radiometric-dating/?utm_source=...

"Radiometric dating is a method of establishing how old something is – perhaps a wooden artefact, a rock, or a fossil – based on the presence of a radioactive isotope within it.

"The basic logic behind radiometric dating is that if you compare the presence of a radioactive isotope within a sample to its known abundance on Earth, and its known half-life (its rate of decay), you can calculate the age of the sample.

***

"Radiocarbon dating is not suitable for dating anything older than around 50,000 years, because 14C decays quickly (its half-life is 5,730 years) and so will not be present in significant enough amounts in older objects to be measurable.

"Potassium-argon dating is a method that allows us to calculate the age of a rock, or how long ago it was formed, by measuring the ratio of radioactive argon to radioactive potassium within it.

***

"Potassium-argon dating is a method that allows us to calculate the age of a rock, or how long ago it was formed, by measuring the ratio of radioactive argon to radioactive potassium within it.

"Argon-argon dating is an updated method, based on the original K-Ar dating technique, that uses neutron irradiation from a nuclear reactor to convert a stable form of potassium into the argon isotope 39Ar, and then measures the ratio of 40Ar to 39Ar.

"Argon-argon dating was used to determine that the Australopithecus Lucy, who rewrote our understanding of early hominin evolution, lived around 3.18 million years ago.

"Uranium-lead dating
This technique involves measuring the ratio of uranium isotopes (238U or 235U) to stable lead isotopes 206Pb, 207Pb and 208Pb. It can be used to determine ages from 4.5 billion years old to 1 million years old. This method is thought to be particularly accurate, with an error-margin that can be less than two million years – not bad in a time span of billions.

"U-Pb dating can be used to date very old rocks, and has its own in-built cross-checking system, since the ratio of 235U to 207Pb and 238U to 206Pb can be compared using a “concordia diagram”, in which samples are plotted along a straight line that intersects the curve at the age of the sample.

***

"Fission-track dating
This method involves examining the polished surface of a slice of rock, and calculating the density of markings – or “tracks” – left in it by the spontaneous fission of 238U impurities.

"The uranium content of the sample must be known

"Fission-track dating identified that the Brahin Pallasite, a meteorite found in the 19th century in Belarus – slabs of which have become a collectors item – underwent its last intensive thermal event 4.26–4.2 billion years ago.

"Chlorine-36 dating
This method involves calculating the prevalence of the very rare isotope chlorine-36 (36Cl), which can be produced in the atmosphere through cosmic rays bombarding argon atoms. It’s used to date very old groundwater, from between around 100,000 and 1 million years old.

***

"Luminescence dating methods are not technically radiometric, since they don’t involve calculating ratios of radioactive isotopes. However, they do use radioactive material.

"This method can date archaeological materials, such as ceramics, and minerals, like lava flows and limestones. It has a normal range of a few decades to 100,000 years old, but some studies have used it to identify much older things."

Comment: Our big brains are plenty smart.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-much-does-evolution-depend-on-chance?utm_source=Aeon+Newslet...

"Here I was, a left-wing scientist, with a scientific narrative that mirrored my political views. Had I, somehow, skewed my interpretation of pipit variation to fit my prejudices? Worse, had I subconsciously skewed the results? I checked and double-checked, and found the same thing. I tried finding new ways of looking at my data, but still I came to the same conclusion. The founder effects looked real. If I had done something wrong, I couldn’t figure out what it was.

"Political beliefs affect science at many levels, from decisions on what research is funded, to the subconscious biases of individual scientists. And for my part, I am sure that my political views have influenced my scientific research, and all along I haven’t had a clue. We constantly make subjective decisions as scientists: which questions get us fired up, which do we ignore, when do we consider a result significant enough to publish, how do we approach an analysis, and how do we interpret our findings. We strive for objectivity, but we can never truly achieve it. Instead we can but hope that the self-correcting process of science weeds out the rubbish, and that truth emerges over time.

"So maybe radical scientists are not such a bad thing after all. Perhaps the likes of Gould and Lewontin, who are able to take a step back and look critically at their whole field, play an essential role in keeping science in check, and therefore in moving it forward. They might have overstepped the mark at times, but their critique of adaptationism was one that needed to be made, and is one that has improved the scientific rigour of evolutionary biology overall. Biologists are now much more careful of inventing adaptive explanations for everything they see, and are more amenable to non-adaptive explanations."

Comment: Global warming is primarily a political left/right issue. The overall climate cooled in the mid 20th century. Then it warmed and then it plateaued until the last strong el Nino. Now it is plateaued again.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47408/title/Publisher-Retracts-Do...

"Springer and BioMed Central today (November 1) announced the retraction of 58 articles across seven journals, affecting more than 200 authors. Springer Nature, the company behind both subsidiary publishers, issued the mass retraction notice upon discovering that some of the now-pulled papers’ authors had manipulated the peer review process, and that some of the reports contained plagiarism.

“'We take every allegation seriously, and investigate every allegation of plagiarism,” a Springer Nature spokesperson told Retraction Watch. “In this case we identified irregularities which led us to suspect a broader pattern of manipulation.”

"While most retractions are quiet, single-study affairs, in recent years publishers have issued an increasing number of mass retractions. In 2014, for instance, Springer and IEEE pulled more than 120 papers that had been produced by SciGen, a random study generator.

"But the most recent cases of misconduct reported by Springer Nature were more difficult to detect. “A much more complex manipulation has taken place from a different group of authors,” the publisher’s spokesperson told Retraction Watch. “It involves complex manipulation of our submission and peer reviews systems.”

"Tumor Biology and Diagnostic Pathology pulled 25 and 23 manipulated papers, respectively. Many of the studies in question cited coauthors Aram Mokarizadeh of the University of Tehran and Emad Yahaghi of the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, also in Iran, who are both named on the paper that launched Springer’s initial investigation, Retraction Watch reported. Seventy percent of the Springer retractions and 93 percent of the BioMed Central retractions showed evidence of plagiarism, the publisher noted—the rest showed evidence of authorship or peer review manipulation.

"Retraction Watch has published a list of the retracted papers. According to Springer Nature, individual notices will be posted throughout the week, explaining why each of the 58 papers was pulled."

Comment: Whew!

http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2016/10/PeerReview.pdf

"Prior to the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, Peter Doherty, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) from its critics. The IPCC involves hundreds of scientists and ‘draws its evidence exclusively from peer-reviewed, published scientific literature’, he wrote. Around the same time, the IPCC chairman was asked if an Indian environment ministry report might alter the IPCC’s pessimistic view of Himalayan glaciers. The ‘IPCC studies only peer-review science’, Rajendra Pachauri replied dismissively. Until the report’s data appears in ‘a decent credible publication’, he said, ‘we can just throw it into the dustbin’.2 Peer-reviewed research is reliable, so the reasoning goes. Non-peer-reviewed research is not. The IPCC makes exclusive use of the former, therefore its conclusions can be trusted. This argument has long been used to deflect criticism and to repel contrary climate perspectives. But behind it lies a dubious assumption: that academic publications are a sound foundation on which to base real-world decisions. In fact, science is currently in the grip of a ’reproducibility crisis’ so severe that the editor of a prominent journal has declared that ‘much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue’. Media coverage declaring that’ science is broken’ has become commonplace.

"Part 1 of this report demonstrates that a journal’s decision to publish a paper provides no assurance that its conclusions are sound. Large swathes of peer-reviewed work contain errors. Fraudulent research makes it past gatekeepers at even the most prestigious journals. And while science is supposed to be self-correcting, the process by which this occurs is haphazard and byzantine. A policy cannot be considered evidence-based if the evidence on which it depends was never independently verified. Peer review does not perform that function.

"News from the worlds of astrobiology, ecology, economics, chemistry, computer science, management studies, medicine, neuroscience, psychology,and physics all tell the same tale: ’peer-reviewed’ does not equal ’policy-ready.’ Part 2 of this report invites us to re-examine what we think we know about the climate. While good scientists have always understood that peer review doesn’t certify accuracy, IPCC officials–supported by politicians, activists, and journalists–think global climate decision-making should rest on this shaky foundation. If half of all peer-reviewed research ‘may simply be untrue’, half of all climate research may also be untrue. The policy implications of this idea are immense."

Comment: This large report gives many examples. One should be aware that 'under the table arrangements' result in friendly uncritical reviews. There are many examples in many of my previous postings.

Tony: http://www.britannica.com/science/stratification-geology
> 
> No direct relationship exists between the thickness and extent of strata and the rate of deposition or the time represented; for example, a stratum of limestone 2.5 cm (1 inch) thick may take longer to form than a stratum of sandstone 3 m (10 feet) in thickness. The most common cause of stratification is variation in the transporting ability of the depositing agent. Water and wind sort sediments according to size, weight, and shape of particles, and these sediments settle in layers of relative homogeneity. Differences in sediment composition resulting from different sources, and variation in sediment brought about by change in agents of deposition, also lead to stratification.-Good reference. The strata do vary in thickness and compositions depending on their history of development.

Tony: One probing question that no one bothers to ask:
> 
> How did this animal/plant/organism get burried rapidly enough for it to be fossilized?-I'm not sure the fossilization process is fully understood. However the fossils exist and tell a story that looks like an evolutionary process.
> 
> Tony: 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.-I didn't think you were a YEC. You are attempting to fit everything into the Bible. Well, I'll stick to four billion, but like you I'm sure God did it for His own reasons, just as I think He set up an evolutionary process for life under His guidance. -> Tony: What bothers me is that scientist ignore their own rules, logic, and discoveries in order to avoid painful, uncomfortable, or embarassing truths. 
> 
> 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. -Like I said, fossilization is not completely understood, but fossils exist to tell a story. We've all seen them. On the Grand Canyon at Deer Falls, 200 feet above the river, there is a large rock, estimated at 200 million years old with obvious fossilized worm borings.-If God controlled all of creation He arranged for fossils in all forms and deposits as they are found by fossil hunters.- Our difference is one of perspective: I'll accept the scientific aging approaches. I know God did it. Like dhw I recognize the Bible is based on human authors and human thought. I don't think humans can read the mind of God.

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.)


> Tony: No one ever claimed that the earth does not add layers as it ages, but there are limitations to that. That being said, here are some counter questions:
> 
> 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?-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.-1) No, there are sudden lava flows, erosion (see below). Continental subduction can disrupt the layers. I've seen this on another river.-2) Erosion by wind, water; earthquakes, ocean silting and volcanic ash eruptions are some of the things I can think of.-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. -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.

Tony: The things that irritate me are when there is circular logic (i.e. the rock strata is dated based on the organisms it contains and the organisms are dated based on the rock strata), when the visible evidence contrdicts the hypothesis (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html), or when they start trying use these speculative hypotheses to prop up other speculative hypotheses, like evolution.
> 
>David: How do you explain The rock strata I've seen and touched in the Grand Canyon. Are they all the same age? Or the Great Unconformity in which missing layers are found only elsewhere in the world? Doesn't the evidence show the Earth adds layers as it ages?-No one ever claimed that the earth does not add layers as it ages, but there are limitations to that. That being said, here are some counter questions:-Is age the ONLY way that layers are formed in the earth?
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)
How do you explain horizontal layers around vertical objects?

Tony: The things that irritate me are when there is circular logic (i.e. the rock strata is dated based on the organisms it contains and the organisms are dated based on the rock strata), when the visible evidence contrdicts the hypothesis (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html), or when they start trying use these speculative hypotheses to prop up other speculative hypotheses, like evolution.-How do you explain The rock strata I've seen and touched in the Grand Canyon. Are they all the same age? Or the Great Unconformity in which missing layers are found only elsewhere in the world? Doesn't the evidence show the Earth adds layers as it ages?


> > >David: Granting that point, how far off do you think the guesses are?
> > 
> > Tony: There is literally know way of knowing. To give one simple example, even with sealed, non-porous, non-contaminated rocks(which really don't exist), the radio-metric dating would only tell you when that rock was formed, not how old the materials that made it are. In the case of igneous rock, that would be when it solidified, and studies on those types if rocks have been off by hundreds of millions of years. In the case of sedimentary rocks, they are all subject to heavy contamination based on their composition and the state of the world at the time that the layers were deposited, and even more so by the fact that until they are exposed to sufficient time and pressure, they are constantly contaminated by water penetration transporting minerals in and out of them.
> 
> I've always accepted a range of 10-20% off in the aging estimates, which is quoted. If the universe is 13.78 byo and the sun about 5 byo, the earth 4.5 byo and the Cambrian explosion about 510 myo, does this really matter, from your point of view?--For some things, it does not matter at all. For example, it would not phase me at all if the universe were 13.78byo, the Sun 5 byo, or the Earth 4.5 byo. Even the pre-human epochs of life would not really phase me that much. The things that irritate me are when there is circular logic (i.e. the rock strata is dated based on the organisms it contains and the organisms are dated based on the rock strata), when the visible evidence contrdicts the hypothesis (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html), or when they start trying use these speculative hypotheses to prop up other speculative hypotheses, like evolution.


> >David: Granting that point, how far off do you think the guesses are?
> 
> Tony: There is literally know way of knowing. To give one simple example, even with sealed, non-porous, non-contaminated rocks(which really don't exist), the radio-metric dating would only tell you when that rock was formed, not how old the materials that made it are. In the case of igneous rock, that would be when it solidified, and studies on those types if rocks have been off by hundreds of millions of years. In the case of sedimentary rocks, they are all subject to heavy contamination based on their composition and the state of the world at the time that the layers were deposited, and even more so by the fact that until they are exposed to sufficient time and pressure, they are constantly contaminated by water penetration transporting minerals in and out of them.-I've always accepted a range of 10-20% off in the aging estimates, which is quoted. If the universe is 13.78 byo and the sun about 5 byo, the earth 4.5 byo and the Cambrian explosion about 510 myo, does this really matter, from your point of view?


> > Tony: But the same underlying problem exists for all of them. They all labor under the major assumption that we KNOW what the starting ratio of parent:daughter elements were, and we don't.
> 
>David: Granting that point, how far off do you think the guesses are?-There is literally know way of knowing. To give one simple example, even with sealed, non-porous, non-contaminated rocks(which really don't exist), the radio-metric dating would only tell you when that rock was formed, not how old the materials that made it are. In the case of igneous rock, that would be when it solidified, and studies on those types if rocks have been off by hundreds of millions of years. In the case of sedimentary rocks, they are all subject to heavy contamination based on their composition and the state of the world at the time that the layers were deposited, and even more so by the fact that until they are exposed to sufficient time and pressure, they are constantly contaminated by water penetration transporting minerals in and out of them.


> Tony: But the same underlying problem exists for all of them. They all labor under the major assumption that we KNOW what the starting ratio of parent:daughter elements were, and we don't.-Granting that point, how far off do you think the guesses are?


> > Tony: Gee... I seem to recall that I've been bagging on carbon dating for years now because the results are inconsistent and questionable.
> 
> But there are at least five other methods and carbon is only for recent events.-But the same underlying problem exists for all of them. They all labor under the major assumption that we KNOW what the starting ratio of parent:daughter elements were, and we don't.