Another issue is that C Dating can only be used as far back as about 50, years so wouldn't be effective past this. Radiometric dating may be possible as it can be used to date rocks but I have no idea if it can be used for Diamonds. In regards to dating diamond via other radiometric dating techniques, there are not any techniques particularly well equipped for dating diamonds directly.
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The most common way is to date very small crystals of other minerals trapped within diamonds, called inclusions. If these crystals happen to be a mineral that we can date with a radiometric technique, then the age of the mineral gives a maximum age for the diamond in which it was encased because the diamond has to be younger than the dated mineral. There was some experimentation with directly dating diamonds using the K-Ar method back in the late 80s which resulted in some ridiculous ages 6. There was a follow up paper a year or two later demonstrating that the there was a clear source of excess radiogenic Argon in these diamonds so that the ages were meaningless.
I'm not aware of any further attempts to directly date diamonds, but it's not a literature stream I follow.
Assumptions of Radioactive Dating • Smilodon's Retreat
Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy. Log in or sign up in seconds. In the growth-ring analyses of approximately one thousand trees in the White Mountains, we have, in fact, found no more than three or four occurrences of even incipient multiple growth layers. In years of severe drought, a bristlecone pine may fail to grow a complete ring all the way around its perimeter; we may find the ring if we bore into the tree from one angle, but not from another. Hence at least some of the missing rings can be found. Even so, the missing rings are a far more serious problem than any double rings.
Other species of trees corroborate the work that Ferguson did with bristlecone pines.
Answers to Creationist Attacks on Carbon-14 Dating
Before his work, the tree-ring sequence of the sequoias had been worked out back to BC. The archaeological ring sequence had been worked out back to 59 BC. The limber pine sequence had been worked out back to 25 BC. The radiocarbon dates and tree-ring dates of these other trees agree with those Ferguson got from the bristlecone pine. But even if he had had no other trees with which to work except the bristlecone pines, that evidence alone would have allowed him to determine the tree-ring chronology back to BC.
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- Can carbon dating technique be used to determine the age of a diamond? Explain why or why not.?.
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See Renfrew for more details. So, creationists who complain about double rings in their attempts to disprove C dating are actually grasping at straws. If the Flood of Noah occurred around BC, as some creationists claim, then all the bristlecone pines would have to be less than five thousand years old. This would mean that eighty-two hundred years worth of tree rings had to form in five thousand years, which would mean that one-third of all the bristlecone pine rings would have to be extra rings.
Creationists are forced into accepting such outlandish conclusions as these in order to jam the facts of nature into the time frame upon which their "scientific" creation model is based. Barnes has claimed that the earth's magnetic field is decaying exponentially with a half-life of fourteen hundred years. Not only does he consider this proof that the earth can be no older than ten thousand years but he also points out that a greater magnetic strength in the past would reduce C dates.
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Now if the magnetic field several thousand years ago was indeed many times stronger than it is today, there would have been less cosmic radiation entering the atmosphere back then and less C would have been produced. Therefore, any C dates taken from objects of that time period would be too high. How do you answer him? Like Cook, Barnes looks at only part of the evidence. What he ignores is the great body of archaeological and geological data showing that the strength of the magnetic field has been fluctuating up and down for thousands of years and that it has reversed polarity many times in the geological past.
So, when Barnes extrapolates ten thousand years into the past, he concludes that the magnetic field was nineteen times stronger in BC than it is today, when, actually, it was only half as intense then as now. This means that radiocarbon ages of objects from that time period will be too young, just as we saw from the bristlecone pine evidence. But how does one know that the magnetic field has fluctuated and reversed polarity?
Aren't these just excuses scientists give in order to neutralize Barnes's claims? The evidence for fluctuations and reversals of the magnetic field is quite solid. Bucha, a Czech geophysicist, has used archaeological artifacts made of baked clay to determine the strength of the earth's magnetic field when they were manufactured.
He found that the earth's magnetic field was 1. See Bailey, Renfrew, and Encyclopedia Britannica for details. In other words, it rose in intensity from 0. Even before the bristlecone pine calibration of C dating was worked out by Ferguson, Bucha predicted that this change in the magnetic field would make radiocarbon dates too young. This idea [that the fluctuating magnetic field affects influx of cosmic rays, which in turn affects C formation rates] has been taken up by the Czech geophysicist, V.
Bucha, who has been able to determine, using samples of baked clay from archeological sites, what the intensity of the earth's magnetic field was at the time in question. Even before the tree-ring calibration data were available to them, he and the archeologist, Evzen Neustupny, were able to suggest how much this would affect the radiocarbon dates.
There is a good correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field as determined by Bucha and the deviation of the atmospheric radiocarbon concentration from its normal value as indicated by the tree-ring radiocarbon work. As for the question of polarity reversals, plate tectonics can teach us much. It is a fact that new oceanic crust continually forms at the mid-oceanic ridges and spreads away from those ridges in opposite directions. When lava at the ridges hardens, it keeps a trace of the magnetism of the earth's magnetic field. Therefore, every time the magnetic field reverses itself, bands of paleomagnetism of reversed polarity show up on the ocean floor alternated with bands of normal polarity.
These bands are thousands of kilometers long, they vary in width, they lie parallel, and the bands on either side of any given ridge form mirror images of each other. Thus it can be demonstrated that the magnetic field of the earth has reversed itself dozens of times throughout earth history. Barnes, writing in , ought to have known better than to quote the gropings and guesses of authors of the early sixties in an effort to debunk magnetic reversals.
Before plate tectonics and continental drift became established in the mid-sixties, the known evidence for magnetic reversals was rather scanty, and geophysicists often tried to invent ingenious mechanisms with which to account for this evidence rather than believe in magnetic reversals. However, by , sea floor spreading and magnetic reversals had been documented to the satisfaction of almost the entire scientific community. Yet, instead of seriously attempting to rebut them with up-to-date evidence, Barnes merely quoted the old guesses of authors who wrote before the facts were known.
But, in spite of Barnes, paleomagnetism on the sea floor conclusively proves that the magnetic field of the earth oscillates in waves and even reverses itself on occasion. It has not been decaying exponentially as Barnes maintains. The ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in carbon dioxide is the ratio in the atmosphere. Green plants absorb carbon dioxide as long as they are alive.
MODERATORS
They use it to produce sugars, fats, cellulose and other organic material. When they die, they stop absorbing carbon dioxide. The carbon 14 gradually decays to nitrogen. The longer it has been since the living thing died, the less carbon 14 there is in the plant. The longer the plant has been dead, the lower the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in it. They get the carbon they need to form tissues and burn as fuel by eating plants.
Since they eat plants that are still alive, or have not been dead long enough for their carbon 14 to decay, the carbon ratio in the bodies of living animals is the same as the carbon ratio in the plants they ate, which is the same as the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in the atmosphere.