Studying His Word and His Works

The world’s largest volcanic eruption in over 100 years occurred June 6-8, 1912 in what is now Katmai National Park in Southwest Alaska. The Novarupta-Katmai eruption of 1912 was 30 times larger than Mt. St. Helen’s 1980 blast.

In 2012, 100 years after the eruption, I had a piece of the Novarupta lava dome (in photo above) age-dated using the Argon-Argon method. While eyewitness testimony and historical documents suggest that Novarupta is no more than 100 years old, the Ar-Ar results concluded the rock sample was up to 5.5 million years old!

Clearly, something is wrong with radiometric methods. My sample is just one in a long line of samples that give huge errors when radiometric dating methods are calibrated against rocks of known age. Radiometric methods may be useful for studying a rock’s environmental history, but are useless for determining absolute ages.

You can read more in my new paper, published in the 50th Anniversary Issue of the Creation Research Society Quarterly: Ar Ar Calibration Against Novarupta

This entry was posted on September 3, 2013 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Novarupta, Volcanoes. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: accelerated nuclear decay, age calibration, Ar/Ar method, excess argon, natural history research, Novarupta, Novarupta-Katmai, Scripture is true history