C14 Dates of Coal, Oil, and Diamonds

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IceAgeCivilizations

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C14 dates by the accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) method show the ages of coal, oil, and diamonds to usually be in the 40k year range, and they can't get any results in the 40k to 90k range, which is what the method was designed to achieve, so what's up with that?

If those deposits are actually millions of years old, there should be only C14 from contamination, but the researchers have ruled that out, "intrinsic C14" are what they are dealing with, after many procedures performed on the sample to make sure it's intrinsic C14 which they are measuring.

Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B have published many articles about this "problem," see also: Giem, P., Carbon-14 content of fossil carbon, Origins, 51, 6-30, 2001.
 
There are many methods scientists use to date things, sometimes they use a collaboration of these methods as a fail safe

Fission-Track Dating
The fission-track method, also known as spontaneous fission-track dating, involves the paths, or tracks, of radiation damage made by nuclear particles in a mineral or glass by the spontaneous fission of uranium-238 impurities. Age in years is calculated by determining the ratio of spontaneous fission-track density to that of induced fission tracks. The method works best for micas, tektites, and meteorites. It has been used to help date the period from about 40,000 to 1 million years ago, an interval not covered by carbon-14 or potassium-argon methods. Rocks subjected to high temperatures or exposed to cosmic-ray bombardment at the earth's surface, however, may yield erroneous ages...
Click to expand...

http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes...ons/Radiometricdating/RadiometricDating .html
 
Uh, Chatha, the AMS method was thought to be able to measure C14 in the 40 to 90k range, but there are no samples in that range, they are all younger than that, ta da!!!
 
Coal is notorious for having Uranium and Thorium (both of which are naturally occuring alpha emitters, with some 30 radiodaughters, most of which are also alpha emitters) present in the coal matrix, allowing nuclear power plants to correctly assert that they release fewer radioactive emissions than coal-fired power plants.

Alpha particles striking Berrylium nuclei (Be-9 is naturally present in minute amounts in coal) produce neutrons, and has long been a neutron source as an initiator of nuclear reactions in nuclear power plants, nuclear bombs, etc.

Neutrons thus created and striking C-13, naturally present in coal at 1.1% relative abundance (the other 98.9% is C-12), would produce C-14 at a very low production rate. Such presence of a few atoms of C-14 would give an erroneously very young age to coal if one attempted to use C-14 as the radioisotope for dating, and thus other techniques need to be utilized.
 
The older the age from C-14 dating, the less the C-14 present. Eventually, once the age approaches 50,000 years, there is so little C-14 present that the 'age' becomes very uncertain. If the C-14 dating gave ages of 6,000 years (a little less than half the amount in living materials), I would say that is a lot of C-14, and it would support a young deposition for the material, absent evidence of other contaminations. The amount of C-14 present that gives an age of 50,000 years is very very little, roughly 1/1000th the amount of recent living material. To obtain an age of 100,000 years would be roughly 1/1,000,000th the amount of C-14 as compared to recent living material, which is almost impossible to measure. That is why C-14 is not very accurate for age dating beyond more than a few half-lives of C-14 (T-1/2 = 5730 years), because there is not enough C-14 present to measure, and the age range becomes anyones guess beyond roughly 70,000 years.

I have no references for C-14 being present in diamonds and oil. Please cite sources.
 
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Reading through the "creationist" web page references, there is one cite for Baumgardner, and his paper "Measureable C-14 in Fossilized Organic Materials".

In the paper, he references that in samples using the U/Th radiometric dating technique, they obtained ages in the 125,000 year range, but they then found some very small amounts of C-14 using the AMS technique (given as percentages of modern C-14; typically at ranges of about 0.1%), giving ages in the 40,000 year range. Now, since they can use the U/Th technique, obviously U and Th are present in those samples.

What is especially interesting is that they obtained relatively the same small amount of C-14, no matter the age of the various samples by other dating techniques. That indicates that the C-14 is being produced at a steady rate, and decays at a steady rate, and has reached equilibrium with a parent production technique, in this case likely the steady neutron production from naturally present Beryllium (due to the well-known alpha on Beryllium neutron production) at a very low rate due to the naturally present U and Th that tends to collect in fossils.

Indeed, this tendency for U/Th to collect in fossils has been used to locate fossils in the southwest by using a sensitive gamma detector to find pockets of U/Th concentrations, which is a good indicator that a fossil is underground near to the surface.
 
It only takes one (or a few if it is less-sensitive) C-14 atom to give a reading using the AMS technique. U/Th is present at about .0001% in some fossils (Uranium and Thorium have a high natural abundance of about 1 ppm of the atoms on the surface of the Earth). Avogadro's number is approximately 6.025 X 10^23 atoms of H per gram of H. You do the math.

And Ice Age, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't claim that the small amount of C-14 present in fossils means they are 40,000 years old, while at the same time claiming the Earth was "created" only 6,000 years ago. Since your ideas are repeatedly falsified, why not look for explanations that work - yours don't.
 
Carbon dating is practically useless for fossil fuels, since the half life of carbon is so short and the ages of these fuels is so great.

Carbon dating becomes unreliable after about 4-5 half-lives, or 50000 years or so. But fossil fuels are millions of years old.
 
James R, the presence of intrinsic C14 makes it clear that those deposits are in the thousands of years of age, they cannot be millions of years old because of the presence of levels of C14 up to 40k years old, pursuant to uniformitarian assumptions.
 
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