Young Earth Evidence 7: Carbon-14 in the Wrong Places

morgueFile/imelenchon (modified)

Another evidence for a young Earth that uses uniformitarian assumptions against evolutionists is the existence of Carbon-14 in the wrong places. According to presuppositions about an ancient Earth and the fundamentally flawed radiometric dating methods, Carbon-14 should not be found in things that are allegedly millions of years old, like diamonds. This is similar to the problem of the amount of helium in rocks, discussed previously.

Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) is a radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils. But it decays so quickly—with a half-life of only 5,730 years—that none is expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years. Yet carbon-14 has been detected in “ancient” fossils—supposedly up to hundreds of millions of years old—ever since the earliest days of radiocarbon dating.

If radiocarbon lasts only a few hundred thousand years, why is it found in all the earth’s diamonds dated at billions of years old?

Even if every atom in the whole earth were carbon-14, they would decay so quickly that no carbon-14 would be left on earth after only 1 million years. Contrary to expectations, between 1984 and 1998 alone, the scientific literature reported carbon-14 in 70 samples that came from fossils, coal, oil, natural gas, and marble representing the fossil-bearing portion of the geologic record, supposedly spanning more than 500 million years. All contained radiocarbon. Further, analyses of fossilized wood and coal samples, supposedly spanning 32–350 million years in age, yielded ages between 20,000 and 50,000 years using carbon-14 dating. Diamonds supposedly 1–3 billion years old similarly yielded carbon-14 ages of only 55,000 years.

You can read the rest of this layman's-level article at "Carbon-14 in Fossils, Coal and Diamonds", here. For the more technically inclined, "Carbon-14 in Fossils and Diamonds".