Earth Same as Today 4 Billion Years Ago
28 November 2008
Michelle Hopkins, a UCLA graduate student in Earth and space sciences said, "In high school, we are taught to see the Earth as a red, hellish, molten-lava Earth. Now we're seeing a new picture, more like today, with continents, water, blue sky, blue ocean, much earlier than we thought."
Geochemists from UCLA have been studying zircons found inside molten rocks that are supposed to be 3 billion years old. Using a high-resolution ion microprobe the team can analyze the zircons ions in a mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer is used to count up the amount of lead and uranium found inside the zircons. This process is called Uranium-lead dating.
238U decays to 206Pb, with a half-life of 4.47 billion years and 235U decays to 207Pb, with a half-life of 704 million years. By comparing the ratios of uranium to lead you can deduce the age of the sample ASUMING:
(1) The sample has not been contaminated
(2) The original sample had none of the daughter products
(3) The decay rate is constant
The RATE Team at ICR has done extensive research on radiometric dating and has shown that decay rates can be drastically changed from their textbook values. The uniformitarian view says that all the process we observe today are exactly the same as they were in the past. This model would be completely incorrect if the world wide flood of the Bible were a literal event. Particles being suspended in water before stratifying and solidifying would completely alter the radiometric dates given.
Geochemistry professor Mark Harrison said, "We discovered the temperature at which these zircons formed was constant and very low, you can't make a magma at any lower temperature than what we're seeing in these zircons. You look at artists' conceptions of the early Earth, with flying objects from outer space making large craters; that should make zircons hundreds of degrees centigrade hotter than the ones we see. The only way you can make zircons at the low temperature we see is if the melt is water-saturated. There had to be abundant water. That's a big surprise because our longstanding conception of the early Earth is that it was dry."
- Zircon dating has many flaws.
- Uniformitarianism forgets about the flood.
- Magma formation under water in the early Earth is no problem with a literal interpretation of the Bible.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/new-picture-of-early-earth-emerges-72068.aspx
