Lead Contamination (common lead content) *Adolph Knopf referred to this important problem (*Scientific Monthly, November 1957). *Faul, a leading authority in the field, recognized it also (*Henry Faul, Nuclear Geology, 1954, p. 297).
"Why do the radioactive ages of lava beds, laid down within a few weeks of each other, differ by millions of years?"—*Glen R. Morton, Electromagnetics and the Appearance of Age.
"The two uranium-lead ages often differ from each other markedly, and the thorium-lead age on the same mineral is almost always drastically lower than either of the others."—*L.T. Aldrich, "Measurement of Radioactive Ages of Rocks," in Science, May 18, 1956, p. 872.
Movement of Argon 40 Gas Problem (*J.F. Evernden, et al., "K/A Dates and the Cenozoic Mammalian Chronology of North America," American Journal of Science, February 1964, p. 154).
Potassium Leaching Problem *Rancitelli and *Fisher (*Planetary Science Abstracts, 48th Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, 1967, p. 167).
200 year old lava rock dated at 1.60 million to 2.96 billion years! (See *Science, October 11, 1968; *Journal of Geophysical Research, July 15, 1968).
Date selections which agree with the 19th-century geologic column dating theories. (*L.R. Stieff, *T.W. Stern and *R.N. Eichler, "Evaluating Discordant Lead-Isotope Ages," U.S. Geological Survey Professional Papers, 1963, No. 414-E).
Moon rocks varied from 2 million to 28 billion years! (For more on this, see *Proceedings of the Second, Third and Fourth Lunar Conferences; Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volumes 14 and 17.)
FIVE WAYS TO CHANGE THE RATES (see *H.C. Dudley, "Radioactivity Re-Examined," Chemical and Engineering News, April 7, 1975, p. 2).
"Sunset Crater, an Arizona Volcano, is known from tree-ring dating to be about 1000 years old. But potassium-argon put it at over 200,000 years [*G.B. Dalrymple, ‘40 Ar/36 Ar Analyses of Historical Lava Flows,’ Earth and Planetary Science Letters 6, 1969, pp. 47-55].
"For the volcanic island of Rangitoto in New Zealand, potassium-argon dated the lava flows as 145,000 to 465,000 years old, but the journal of the Geochemical Society noted that ‘the radiocarbon, geological and botanical evidence unequivocally shows that it was active and was probably built during the last 1000 years.’ In fact, wood buried underneath its lava has been carbon-dated as less than 350 years old [*Ian McDougall, *H.A.
Polach, and *J.J. Stipp, ‘Excess Radiogenic Argon in Young Subaerial Basalts from Auckland Volcanic Field, New Zealand,’ Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, December 1969, pp. 1485, 1499]."Even the lava dome of Mount St. Helens [produced in 1980] has been radiometrically dated at 2.8 million years [H.M. Morris, ‘Radiometric Dating,’ Back to Genesis, 1997]."—James Perloff, Tornado in a Junkyard (1999), p. 146.
Radio Carbon Dating "It may come as a shock to some, but fewer than 50 percent of the radiocarbon dates from geological and archaeological samples in northeastern North America have been adopted as ‘acceptable’ by investigators."—*J. Ogden III, "The Use and Abuse of Radiocarbon," in Annals of the New York Academy of Science, Vol. 288, 1977, pp. 167-173.
"C-14 dating was being discussed at a symposium on the prehistory of the Nile Valley. A famous American colleague, Professor Brew, briefly summarized a common attitude among archaeologists toward it, as follows: ‘If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely ‘out-of-date,’ we just drop it."—*T. Save-Soderbergh and *Ingrid U. Olsson, "C-14 Dating and Egyptian Chronology," Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology, ed. *Ingrid U. Olsson (1970), p. 35 [also in *Pensee, 3(1): 44].
Much more from The Evolution Handbook