RE: How old is the Earth?
October 15, 2010 at 5:06 am
(This post was last modified: October 15, 2010 at 5:19 am by Anomalocaris.)
(October 15, 2010 at 3:58 am)TheDarkestOfAngels Wrote: Sorry, but this isn't technically true that radioactive elements can't be altered chemically.
Carbon 14, for example, can become radioactive carbon dioxide, which makes it less useful for radiocarbon dating for a number of reasons.
We are talking about different things. Radioactive elements can not be altered by any chemical reaction, nor can it's rate of decay. But chemical compounds incorporating the radioactive elements can be altered by chemical processes just like can chemical compounds incorporating nonradioactive isotopes of the same element. The chemical properties of different isotopes of the same element are extremely similar.
Chemistry can in some cases mobilize either parent or daughter elements. But we know chemistry well enough to exclude this possibility from most radioactive dating. A few false returns traceable to specific causes do not invalidate bulk of the results that are consistent and have no know cause for false returns. If an volcano boils away daughter elements, it would tend to make the mineral look younger than it is. So it would be All the more embarrassing if the erroneous young age thus derived still exceeds 6000 years by a large margin.
