Granite’s Captive

A thin metal tower holds a drilling rig as it is guided down to a depth of down to 2.6 miles bellow the surface at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.  At this depth, the temperature reaches 595 degrees (F), and RATE researchers (mentioned in previous posts) knew that this was the perfect place to find the particular kind of granite samples they needed.  In this radioisotopes Clue series we have discussed granite and their radiohalos, but there is more to radioactive decay in granite than just their radical radiohalos.  When this kind of radioactive decay occurs, and alpha particle, which is essentially the same a a helium atom, is released.  However, it takes the helium a little white to get completely out of the rock it came from, which is simply called helium diffusion.  We can measure this helium diffusion in the same sort of way we would with regular radioisotope dating. Scientists have a much better understanding of helium diffusion than they do of radioactive decay in general.

RATE sent their granite samples to be tested for helium content, or in other words, to see how much (if any) helium was left from radioactive decay.  However, before they got the results back from the lab, they published their predictions of what they expected the data graph to look like assuming a young earth and global flood.  When the data came back it match the creationist prediction almost exactly while the uniformitarian/billions-of-years/evolutionary predication was off by a factor of 100 thousand (you can see the graph at http://www.icr.org/article/6229/ ).   That means that helium would have to speed up by 100 thousand times their current known rates of escape in order to account for millions of years.

You may be asking, “so what does this mean to me, as a regular person and non-scientist?”, and perhaps rightfully so, because sometimes it can be very confusing to try to keep up with all the technical scientific jargon, even in this simplified explanation.  What it this means is simply that these rocks way down deep and supposedly millions of years old really cannot be that old.  It means that the Bible really is true and reliable and that just because a bunch of scientists say something is millions of years old doesn’t make it that old, because there is strong scientific support in the young-earth model.