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Carbon 14—still drawing a blank

Ken W. from Australia e-mailed CMI with a question about carbon dating in relation to Gavin Cox’s recent article on the newly discovered Durrington Circle, near Stonehenge, Salisbury, UK.

Gavin Cox responds:

Dear Ken,

Thanks for your question. I’m glad you enjoyed my article on the newly discovered pit circle at Durrington, near the world famous Stonehenge monument.

As you have noted, the radiocarbon dates coming from shell and bone extracted from the pits highlight the problems behind the method of carbon 14 (¹⁴C) dating. You allude to a well-kept ‘trade secret’ of ¹⁴C dating labs regarding their procedures. In theory it is not possible to obtain ¹⁴C dates from supposedly ‘ancient’ specimens, like oil, gas, fossil dinosaur bones, coal, diamonds, etc. These are all believed to be millions of years old, so would be expected to be radiocarbon ‘dead’ (meaning all detectable ¹⁴C has degraded back to nitrogen). However, for decades now, the radiocarbon literature has been full of examples of measurable amounts of radiocarbon, in supposedly ‘ancient’ (‘millions of years old’) samples. So ‘contamination’ becomes the catchword to explain all such ‘anomalies’.

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However, researchers using modern accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) laboratory methods have many ways to determine and account for contamination in their samples. The method is incredibly accurate, and can detect and count individual atoms of ¹⁴C and carbon 12 in any given sample. As with any laboratory equipment, it needs calibrating. They do this by analysing ‘procedural blanks’, which typically may be a block of pre-Cambrian granite, or calcite, or other such ‘ancient’ material that would be expected to have no ¹⁴C in it. But due to the increased accuracy of the AMS method, even their ‘blanks’ have not been found to be ‘blank’, and have been found to contain ¹⁴C, intrinsic to the sample, and not as an explainable modern contaminant. Such a state of affairs means that all their results will be skewed, making samples appear older than they really are. (Combined with the uniformitarian assumptions of ancient history and uniform rates, that assume an unchanged carbon ratio in the biosphere, it makes ¹⁴C dating a highly problematic method, the further one goes back in time. See the Creation Answers Book chapter 4 on radiocarbon dating for further details.)

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A group of creation scientists looked at all this (called the RATE project, standing for Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth). They independently confirmed (and published their findings in 2005) that ¹⁴C is ubiquitously found in supposedly ancient samples (like coal), even supposedly multi millions of years of age.¹ They even tested supposed ‘ancient’ diamonds, which would be expected to be virtually impossible to contaminate due to the very hard crystal lattice structure; even these were found to contain measurable amounts of ¹⁴C. (These were sent away to world-class, independent ¹⁴C dating labs).

There are even reports of dinosaur soft tissue containing ¹⁴C. All of this experimental data goes to demonstrate the supposed long ages are actually an illusion, based on a lot of assumptions. Therefore, we shouldn’t accept these ‘ancient ages’ of ¹⁴C running into tens and hundreds of thousands of years, far in excess of biblical history. The age of the shells found at the Durrington Circle pit (7,179 ± 28 years BC) being in excess of the biblical age for the Earth should be dismissed along with the assumptions behind the method.