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Creation Magazine Volume 28 Issue 1 Cover

First published:
Creation 28(4):26–27
September  2006

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Diamonds: a creationist’s best friend

Radiocarbon in diamonds: enemy of billions of years

by Jonathan Sarfati

Carbon

What do hard sparkling diamonds and dull soft pencil ‘lead’ have in common? They are both forms (allotropes) of carbon. Most carbon atoms are 12 times heavier than hydrogen (12C), about one in 100 is 13 times heavier (13C), and one in a trillion (1012) is 14 times heavier (14C). Of these different types (isotopes) of carbon, 14C is called radiocarbon, because it is radioactive—it breaks down over time.

Radiocarbon dating

Photo by Mauricio Nascimento, www.sxc.hu

blue gill

Some try to measure age by how much 14C has decayed. Many people think that radiocarbon dating proves billions of years.1 But evolutionists know it can’t, because 14C decays too fast. Its half-life (t½) is only 5,730 years—that is, every 5,730 years, half of it decays away. After two half lives, a quarter is left; after three half lives, only an eighth; after 10 half lives, less than a thousandth is left.2 In fact, a lump of 14C as massive as the earth would have all decayed in less than a million years.3

So if samples were really over a million years old, there would be no radiocarbon left. But is this not what we find, even with very sensitive 14C detectors.4

Diamonds

Diamond is the hardest substance known, so its interior should be very resistant to contamination. Diamond requires very high pressure to form—pressure found naturally on earth only deep below the surface. Thus they probably formed at a depth of 100–200 km. Geologists believe that the ones we find must have been transported supersonically5 to the surface, in extremely violent eruptions through volcanic pipes. Some are found in these pipes, such as kimberlites, while other diamonds were liberated by water erosion and deposited elsewhere (called alluvial diamonds). According to evolutionists, the diamonds formed about 1–3 billion years ago.5

The presence of radiocarbon in these diamonds where there should be none is thus sparkling evidence for a ‘young’ world, as the Bible records.

Dating diamonds

Geophysicist Dr John Baumgardner, part of the RATE research group,6 investigated 14C in a number of diamonds.7 There should be no 14C at all if they really were over a billion years old, yet the radiocarbon lab reported that there was over 10 times the detection limit. Thus they had a radiocarbon ‘age’ far less than a million years! Dr Baumgardner repeated this with six more alluvial diamonds from Namibia, and these had even more radiocarbon.

The presence of radiocarbon in these diamonds where there should be none is thus sparkling evidence for a ‘young’ world, as the Bible records.

Objections (technical) and answers

  1. The 14C readings in the diamonds are the result of background radiation in the detector. This shows that the objector doesn’t even understand the method. AMS doesn’t measure radiation but counts atoms. It was the obsolete scintillation method that counted only decaying atoms, so was far less sensitive. In any case, the mean of the 14C/C ratios in Dr Baumgardner’s diamonds was close to 0.12±0.01 pMC, well above that of the lab’s background of purified natural gas (0.08 pMC).
  2. The 14C was produced by U-fission (this was an excuse proposed for 14C in coal, also analysed in Dr Baumgardner’s paper, but not possible for diamonds). But to explain the observed 14C, then the coal would have to contain 99% uranium, so colloquial parlance would term the sample ‘uranium’ rather than ‘coal’.1
  3. The 14C was produced by neutron capture by 14N impurities in the diamonds. But this would generate less than one ten-thousandth of the measured amount even in best case scenarios of normal decay. And as Dr Paul Giem points out:
    ‘One can hypothesize that neutrons were once much more plentiful than they are now, and that is why there is so much carbon-14 in our experimental samples. But the number of neutrons required must be over a million times more than those found today, for at least 6,000 years; and every 5,730 years that we put the neutron shower back doubles the number of neutrons required. Every time we halve the duration of the neutron shower we roughly double its required intensity. Eventually the problem becomes insurmountable. In addition, since nitrogen-14 captures neutrons 110,000 times more easily than does carbon-13, a sample with 0.000 0091% nitrogen should have twice the carbon-14 content of a sample without any nitrogen. If neutron capture is a significant source of carbon-14 in a given sample, radiocarbon dates should vary wildly with the nitrogen content of the sample. I know of no such data. Perhaps this effect should be looked for by anyone seriously proposing that significant quantities of carbon-14 were produced by nuclear synthesis in situ.’2
    Also, if atmospheric contamination were responsible, the entire carbon content would have to be exchanged every million years or so. But if this were occurring, we would expect huge variations in radiocarbon dates with porosity and thickness, which would also render the method useless.1 Dr Baumgardner thus first thought that the 14C must have been there right from the beginning. But if nuclear decay were accelerated, say a recent episode of 500 million years worth, it could explain some of the observed amounts. Indeed, his RATE colleagues have shown good evidence for accelerated decay in the past, which would invalidate radiometric dating.
  4. The 14C ‘dates’ for the diamonds of 55,700 years were still much older than the biblical timescale. This misses the point: we are not claiming that this ‘date’ is the actual age; rather, if the earth were just a million years old, let alone 4.6 billion years old, there should be no 14C at all! Another point is that the 55,700 years is based on an assumed 14C level in the atmosphere. Since no one, creationist or evolutionist, thinks there has been an exchange of carbon in the diamond with the atmosphere, using the standard formula for 14C dating to work out the age of a diamond is meaningless. Also, 14C dating assumes that the 14C/C ratio has been constant. But the Flood must have buried huge numbers of carbon-containing living creatures, and some of them likely formed today’s coal, oil, natural gas and some of today’s fossil-containing limestone. Studies of the ancient biosphere indicate that there was several hundred times as much carbon in the past, so the 14C/C ratio would have been several hundred times smaller. This would explain the observed small amounts of 14C found in ‘old’ samples that were likely buried in the Flood.

Reference

  1. Rotta, R.B., Evolutionary explanations for anomalous radiocarbon in coal? Creation Research Society Quarterly 41(2):104–112, September 2004. Return to text.
  2. Giem, P., Carbon-14 content of fossil carbon, Origins 51:6–30 (2001); <www.grisda.org/origins/51006.htm>. Return to text.

References and notes

  1. For example, the ‘Rev.’ Barry Lynn, leader of the anti-Christian group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, proclaimed in a nationally televised debate, ‘Carbon dating, that shows the earth is billions of years old!’ (Firing Line, PBS, 19 December 1997). Return to text.
  2. The time t since radioactive decay commenced can be given by N/N0 = e–λt, where N is the number of atoms measured in the present; N0 is the initial number; λ, the decay constant, which is related to the half life t½ by λ = ln2/t½. This presupposes that the system is closed, so that the loss of atoms is solely by decay, and that the decay rate is constant. See also Sarfati, J., Refuting Compromise, ch. 12, Master Books, Arkansas, USA, 2004. Return to text.
  3. The earth’s mass is 6x1027 g; equivalent to 4.3x1026 moles of 14C. Each mole contains Avogadro’s number (NA = 6.022x1023) of atoms. It takes only 167 halvings to get down to a single atom (log2(4.3x1026 mol x 6.022x1023 mol–1) = log10(2.58x1050) / log102), and 167 half-lives is well under a million years. Return to text.
  4. AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) counts the atoms themselves, and can detect one 14C in more than 1016 atoms, or measure a 14C/C ratio of <10–16 or 0.01% of the modern ratio (0.01 pMC, percent modern carbon). Return to text.
  5. Otherwise the diamond would anneal into graphite, so-called pencil ‘lead’. See Snelling, A., Diamonds—evidence of explosive geological processes, Creation 16(1):42–45, 1993; cf. Diamond Science, <www.diamondwholesalecorporation.com/DiamondScience.html>, accessed 22 May 2006. Return to text.
  6. Vardiman, L., Snelling, A. and Chaffin, E., Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Vol. II, ch. 8, Institute for Creation Research, California, USA, 2005. Dr Baumgardner also investigated many coal samples, and they also turned out to have 14C. Return to text.
  7. Baumgardner, J., 14C evidence for a recent global flood and a young earth; in ref. 6, ch. 8. See also his paper Measurable 14C in fossilized organic materials: confirming the young earth creation-flood model, 5th International Conference on Creationism, 2003. Return to text.
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