Lake Suigetsu, the Flood and Objects of Known Age

[jwu]

Pretty much all of you have seen this graph:

It's commonly used to support various dating methods by showinga strong correlation between them, which would be extremely hrd to explain if they were flawed in some major way.

However, there is something else that struck me about it:
Assuming that a global flood happened, all these varves and coral layers elsewhere would have to have formed after that flood. We have things which could not possibly be pre-flood or mid-flood which give very old C14 readings.

In other words, anything which puts off C14 dating would have to have happened after the flood, the flood itself is not a valid explaination for this anymore at all (it never really was...but anyway).


However, this also has strong implications regarding what we should see if we date things of known age. As long as the mysterious process which oddly put both C14 and the lake varves off to the same degree
was still going on we should consistently get too old readings for things of known age - i.e. anything that is 3700 years old should give a ~20,000 years reading if the process took until about 3000 years ago. However, that is not what we observe. E.g. egyptian mummies come up with nice dates.
And tree ring counts (of individual old trees, not sequences patched together from several trees!) indicate that no major changes ocured for a very long time either.
This means that it would have to have happened very rapidly after the supposed flood but before a significant chunk of recorded history and tree ring data began.


So...question to the YECs: How long did it take for the varves to form after the flood?
How many varves formed in the year after the flood?
How many in the year 5 post flood?
Year 10?
Year 20?
Year 50?
Year 100?
...

Please be specific. Any higher resolution of years would be welcome.

 

[shinbits]

Most Creationists hold that the Flood happened around 2400 B.C.

Is this a problem?

 

[jwu]

For the flood, yes - because lake suigetsu has 40,000 annual varves without being disturbed by a global flood.

So the typical creationist response is that they formed faster than that. However, a correlation with C14 dating can be seen in the above graph.

Of course, creationists don't accept C14 dating either., at least when it comes to things as old or older than the supposed flood.

Since there are also objects whose age is known from recorded history which give nice results when one dates them with C14 and which basically creationists have to accept as well, this leaves only a very small range of time in which the rest could have formed.

E.g. if C14 dating is accepted by creationists to be good for things up to 4000 years old, then this means that the first 4000 varves really are annual ones and 36,000 varves must have formed within 400 years, while at the same time mysterious events affected C14 dating to the same degree.

 

[And-U-Say]

For the flood, yes - because lake suigetsu has 40,000 annual varves without being disturbed by a global flood.

So the typical creationist response is that they formed faster than that. However, a correlation with C14 dating can be seen in the above graph.

Of course, creationists don't accept C14 dating either., at least when it comes to things as old or older than the supposed flood.

Since there are also objects whose age is known from recorded history which give nice results when one dates them with C14 and which basically creationists have to accept as well, this leaves only a very small range of time in which the rest could have formed.

E.g. if C14 dating is accepted by creationists to be good for things up to 4000 years old, then this means that the first 4000 varves really are annual ones and 36,000 varves must have formed within 400 years, while at the same time mysterious events affected C14 dating to the same degree.

Odd how the C14 dating and the varve layers correlate. No rapid process could ever accomplish this. The rapid layers claim is simple nonsense in this light.

Why don't creationists actually come up with something with even the tiniest bit of explanatory power??

 

[Pseudonym]

That's very interesting how all of the dating techniques agree with each other. So much for the Earth being 6000 years old.

 

[shinbits]

Wouldn't an event the calibur of the Flood be able to accomplilsh this in one year?

 

[shinbits]

That's very interesting how all of the dating techniques agree with each other. So much for the Earth being 6000 years old.

Agreed.

 

[Mocca]

Wouldn't an event the calibur of the Flood be able to accomplilsh this in one year?

Well, the Flood probably isn't likely to lay down stuff in the pattern found in Lake Suigetsu:

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/suigetsu.htm

is a nice page explaining the Lake stuff.

 

[Loudmouth]

Wouldn't an event the calibur of the Flood be able to accomplilsh this in one year?

I don't think you understand lake varves. Each year a layer of diatoms and clay are created, one in the summer when diatoms are continually growing and one in the winter when only clay is settling out of the lake. I have never heard of a flood sorting diatoms and clay into distinct layers. For carbon dating the scientists pulled out leaves and insects from each layer. The lower they went the less 14C they found in biological samples.

So how is a flood capable of sorting diatoms and clay into distinct layers, indistinguishalbe from annual events observed in the modern age? How is a global flood capable of keeping out salt water species of diatoms? How is a flood capable of sorting insects and leaves solely by their 14C content in a way that mimics thousands of years of deposition?

 

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Wouldn't an event the calibur of the Flood be able to accomplilsh this in one year?

How? Why would the flood make varves that look exactly like those being laid down no with no "break in the action"? Why would the C14 in varves laid down in a flood year just happen to decrease in proportion to their position just like those laid down now? Why would there be a correlation to tree ring chronologies by C14? There is a good page on this HERE. Why would the lake varve and tree ring data not only correlate but also correlate with data from ice cores and coral couplets as discussed HERE? There is no possible way to fit the lake varve, tree ring, coral and ice core data calibrating C14 dating into a YEC global flood framework.

 

[jwu]

And besides the lake is on top of what would be the strata that could habe been laid down by the flood. And of course there is no reason why a global flood should produce layers which are so neatly confined to the area of this particular lake. There is no way that the flood could have produced these layers, nor that they could have survived "through" the flood.

 

[JohnR7]

For the flood, yes - because lake suigetsu has 40,000 annual varves without being disturbed by a global flood.

If you have 40,000 layers and the earth is 6,000 years old, then you would have had to accumulate 6.66 layers per year.
We all know that this is the number of the antichrist.

 

[Abongil]

If you have 40,000 layers and the earth is 6,000 years old, then you would have had to accumulate 6.66 layers per year.
We all know that this is the number of the antichrist.

actually 616 is the number of the antichrist. Believe it or not, but people actually changed the beliefs of Christianity over its history

 

[jwu]

If you have 40,000 layers and the earth is 6,000 years old, then you would have had to accumulate 6.66 layers per year.
We all know that this is the number of the antichrist.

It's my point that you don't have that many years to accumulate that many varves, a few hundred at most.

 

[shinbits]

Can anyone else expound more on John's point? It apears to be a valid one.

 

[OdwinOddball]

Can anyone else expound more on John's point? It apears to be a valid one.

Valid? Only in the same way any numerology is valid. Coincidences happen, especially when you choose the numbers to be used.

 

[jwu]

The graph even shows more than 40,000 layers (closing to 50,000), so that 6.66 per year number is out.

And even if it wasn't...so what?

 

[And-U-Say]

Can anyone else expound more on John's point? It apears to be a valid one.

What???? I can only imagine you are a parody, nobody really thinks like this, do they?

 

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

So I wonder if any Young Earth Creationist will have anything substantive to say on this thread. We keep hearing that YEC look at the same data but interpret it differently. Where is the YEC interpretation that makes sense in the light of these data?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/57077775@N00/52801399/

 

[Loudmouth]

Just thought I would add there are two sets of lake varve data, one from Japan and one from Poland. The carbon-14 content in the biological samples match up. So how can a flood create the same carbon-14 sorting in two lakes on opposite sides of the globe?

Open circles from the lake in Poland, closed circles from the lake in Japan.