Creationism in Crisis - How Radiometric Dating Really Works - And Refutes Creationism

Example of a radioactive decay chain from lead-212 (²¹²Pb) to lead-208 (²⁰⁸Pb) . Each parent nuclide spontaneously decays into a daughter nuclide (the decay product) via an α decay or a β− decay. The final decay product, lead-208 (²⁰⁸Pb), is stable and can no longer undergo spontaneous radioactive decay.

Source: Wikipedia

Creationism in Crisis - How Radiometric Dating Really Works - And Refutes Creationism

As a service to Creationists, I asked ChatGPT to outline the main geochronology techniques, how and when they are used by palaeontologists, what their limitations are, and how scientists allow for possible sources of error.

All creationists need do is explain how and where these techniques are wrong and what the source of error is that can make 10,000 years or less look like hundreds of millions, or billions of years, without claiming the fundamental forces which control the universe changed to such an extent that atoms would not have been able to form when the they believe the universe, Earth and all life on it were created.

Remember to supply the verified evidence because a claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and false claims will simply demonstrate what many people already know - that creationism is a cult for people gullible enough to believe falsehoods and ignorant enough not to know they've been fooled.

Creationism in Crisis - A 15 Million-Year-Old Former Lake in Southern Germany Is Drowning Creationism With Facts

Ries Crater, Germany

NASA image created by Jesse Allen,

Drill core from borehole taken in 1981 from the Nördlinger Ries. There are distinctive layers of light-coloured dolomite between fine-layered dark sediments of the former crater lake.

Photo: Gernot Arp, Göttingen University

Information for the Media - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

15 million years before 'Creation Week', when creationists think Earth was magically created out of nothing, a meteorite struck in what is now southern Germany, just north of the Danube, creating a circular crater that filled with water to form a lake, in an area surrounded by the hills known as the Nördlinger Ries.

Now the sedimentary rocks formed on the lakebed are revealing their locked-up record of the geological and biological changes in the intervening 15 million years of Earth's 'pre-Creation' history.

They are also providing useful information about what any signs of life in Martian craters might look like.

First, a little AI information about Nördlinger Ries:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Show How a Dynamic And Changing Earth Influenced Evolution Over Millions of 'Pre-Creation' Years

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Landscape dynamics determine the evolution of biodiversity on Earth - The University of Sydney

A dynamic and changing Earth.

From Salles, T., Husson, L., Lorcery, M. et al. (2023

Again, it's the turn of geologists to refute creationism without even trying, like so many biologists do with their daily work.

Creationists insist that Earth is 'fine-tuned' for life; but as anyone who understands biology will know, life is 'fine-tuned' for Earth and the tuning process is called evolution by natural selection.

The observable fact that, over time, species have either evolved or gone extinct gives the lie to the 'fine-tuned for life' assertion because, if that were true, there would be no selection pressure for change and the fossil record would show no change.

In fact, the fossil record wouldn't exist as we know it because there would have been no evolution beyond the first free-living, single-celled prokaryote organisms because their environment would have been perfect for them.

Yet, as we know from daily observation, Earth is a changing and dynamic planet with periodic climate change, earthquakes and volcanoes caused by the slow process of plate tectonics, changing oxygen and carbon dioxide levels caused by the rise and fall of major ecosystems, and changing ocean currents caused by a number of different factors, not the least of which are climate change and plate tectonics. Then there are the cosmological changes caused by the Milankovitch cycles.

One of the consequences of this dynamic change is the way the Earth's surface is continually being recycled over geological time by erosion, transportation in water and sedimentation in ocean deposits as nutrients, then subduction and mountain-building and eventual resurfacing through volcanic activity. This gives changing levels of nutrients in the oceans that affect biodiversity both in the seas and on land.

This is the conclusion of a study by a team of geologists jointly led by Dr Tristan Salles of The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and Dr Laurent Husson of Université Grenoble-Alpes, Grenoble, France. They have shown an association between changes in nutrient levels due to sedimentation and mass extinctions. Their findings are published open access in Nature and are explained in a University of Sydney news release:

Creationism in Crisis - How America's East Coast Formed - 230 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Vector graphic of the land mass of the supercontinent Pangea.

Credit: Rainer Lesniewski

Vector graphic of the land mass of the supercontinent Pangea.

Credit: Rainer Lesniewski

Study Illuminates Formation of U.S. East Coast During Breakup of Supercontinent Pangea - SMU

It's not just the biologists who are incidentally refuting creationism with just about every peer-reviewed research paper; now the geologists are doing the same.

The problem for creationists is that their superstition has no basis in facts because it didn't happen and the record of how it did happen is in the evidence that science is revealing, so inevitably that evidence is going to refute the childish fairytale that creationists were taught by their parents who were taught it by their parents...

Take this piece of geological research into the formation of the East Coast of the USA, for example. It was carried out by scientists from the University of New Mexico, Southern Methodist University seismologist, Professor Maria Beatrice Magnani, and scientists from Northern Arizona University and the University of Southern California. It occurred in that long 'pre-Creation' history before creationists think Earth was magicked up out of nothing.

It is based on the knowledge that the East Coast of America formed when the supercontinent, Pangea, broke up some 230 million years before creationists think Earth existed.

Because it wasn't known about by the parochial and scientifically illiterate Bronze Age authors of their holy books, creationists are completely unaware of the way the present land-masses were formed on the breakup of Pangea, despite the abundant tectonic evidence in the form of mid-ocean ridges with their embedded record of multiple magnetic reversals over millions of years, subduction zones, earthquakes, volcanoes and uplift folds to form hills and mountains at tectonic plate margins.

Geology is a science about which my education has been somewhat lacking (I'm a biologist, physiologist and biochemist by training) but as I understand it, the edges of continents that were the site of the original rifts that opened up to form the oceans, particularly the Atlantic Oceans, will also show evidence of magma that would have welled up in the initial stages of the split.

In the case of the North American Atlantic coast, which is passive in this process because it is simply being pulled away from what is now Northwest Africa, and has not been subject to collisions with other plates, or any significant volcanic activity, these traces of magma are still to be found in the edges of the continental shelf beneath the ocean floor. Associated with the passive margin is a magnetic anomaly, The East Coast Magnetic Anomaly (ECMA), that runs parallel to the American East Coast.

My knowledge of the American East Coast is limited to two week vacation in Boston about 12 years ago, during which I tried bathing in Cape Cod Bay from a beach near South Wellfleet, to discover that I was standing barefoot on king crabs, either dead or alive (their remains littered the beach along Cape Cod), so I didn't spend long in the water - not that they were any threat to me but because they are not very pleasant to walk on.

As the Southern Methodist University news release explains:

Creationism in Crisis - How the Birth of the Atlantic Ocean Caused a Mass Extinction - 55 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Top left: The drilling ship "JOIDES Resolution" off the Norwegian coast.
Photo: Peter Betlem (IODP)

Bottom left: Geophysicists on the deck of the "JOIDES Resolution"
Photo: Sayantani Chatterjee (IODP)

Top right: The drilling ship "JOIDES Resolution" at sunrise.
Photo: Peter Betlem (IODP)

Bottom right: Sections of the cores.
Photo: Sandra Herrmann (IODP/JRSO)

Mid-North Atlantic hydrothermal vent

Past climate warming driven by hydrothermal vents - GEOMAR - Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel

In that very long period during which some 99.97% of Earth's history occurred prior to when creationists believe the Universe, Earth and life on it was created, the supercontinent, Pangea, split apart, then about 55 million years ago, North America and Eurasia drifted apart as did South America and Africa, opening up a rift which flooded to become the North and South Atlantic Oceans.

This coincided with an event called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) during which Earth's temperature rose by about 5-8 ^oC. causing a mass extinction. The exact cause of the PETM has been something of a puzzle for palaeontologists and geologists, until now.