Monday, October 18, 2010

Mount St. Helens Lava Dome - New is already Old?

Several lava domes that are 340k to 2.8M years old were formed at Mount St. Helens six years after it erupted. Yes, you read that right!

Selections from Can "Relative" Radiometric Dating Help Refine Biblical Chronology? by John K. Reed and Carl R. Froede Jr.

(This excerpt by Marko is from the article published in Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Volume 47, Number 1, Summer, 2010, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/abstracts/Abstracts47-1.htm). 

Several lava domes have formed at Mount St. Helens since the May 1980 In June 1992, Austin collected and radiometrically dated a lava dome rock sample (Austin, 1996). The resulting analysis suggested a radiometric age range of 340 thousand to 2.8 million years for the six-year-old dome. Such studies demonstrate the inherent uncertainty in these radiometric methods.

Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens
(Photograph by Richard B. Waitt, Skamania County, Washington, 1982. Used courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.)

References

Austin, S.A. 1994. Are Grand Canyon rocks one billion years old? In Austin, S.A. (editor), Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, pp. 111-131. Institute for Creation Research, Dallas, TX.