K-Ar dating gives inaccurate results for modern volcanic rocks (Talk.Origins)

Claim CD013:


 * Potassium-argon dating of rocks from lava flows known to be modern gave ages millions to billions of years older.

Source: Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 146-147.

CreationWiki response:

Talk Origins' cited source is out of date, since it is more than 30 years old. A lot of progress has been made by Creation Scientists in that time; the recent work of the RATE Group is a good example.

To Talk Origins' credit, they do acknowledge that initial potassium is a problem for Potassium-argon dating. However, despite Talk Origins' claims about 40Ar/39Ar dating, that has problems of its own. Despite Talk Origins' claims to the contrary 40Ar/39Ar dating does suffer from problems associated with initial argon. It can produce dates greater than the 4.5 billion year Uniformitarian age for the Earth and on some historical samples it has produced negative ages.

As if that were not bad enough, it has been shown that many published "ages" have no merit, even by Uniformitarian standards.
 * Reference: Potassium-Argon and Argon-Argon Dating of Crystal Rocks and the Problem of Excess Argon
 * Reference: "Excess Argon": The "Achillies' Heel" of Potassium-Argon and Argon-Argon "Dating" of Volcanic Rocks
 * Reference: Ar-Ar dating
 * Reference: G.B. Dalrymple, "40Ar/39Ar Analyses of Historic Lava Flows," Earth and Planetary Science Letters,6 (1969): pp. 47-55.

Furthermore, the "errors" Talk Origins associates with Morris' reference to Funkhouser and Naughton (1968) seem not to be an error on Morris part, but actually a result of more recent studies. His quote from Funkhouser and Naughton (1968) shows that they attributed the excess argon to "fluid and gaseous inclusions" rather than olivine "xenoliths". That said, creationists agree that these cases are the result of the inclusion of older material; the question at issue is how often that occurs and is not noticed because the date agrees with the Geological column.