Young Graphite in Old Rocks?

The age difference between the oldest and youngest estimated date of these rocks is 1.75 million years.



Joel Kontinen

”Young Graphite in Old Rocks” sounds like a headline in Creation magazine, but this time it is from ScienceDaily, a site known for its unwavering pro-Darwinian approach.

Dominic Papineau, an associate professor at Boston College, and colleagues recently published a paper in Nature Geoscience on the ancient rocks in the Hudson Bay area in Canada.

The researchers think that the graphite in the rocks is several millions of years younger than the rocks. (Graphite is one of the allotrophic forms of carbon.)

The rock itself is assumed to be 3.8 – 4.2 billion years old. It seems that finding carbon in so old rock is not compatible with evolutionary thinking, so the researchers have to assume that the graphite must have entered the rocks later.

All known life on Earth is carbon-based. The evolution model does not allow for life to be born too early, so the ancient carbon creates a huge problem and a need for finding explanations.

Carbon is an interesting substance since diamonds for instance are a form of carbon. They actually contain C-14 that has a half life of 5, 730 years. This means in effect that diamonds said to be billions of years old cannot be older than some tens of thousands of years.

It real life, the dog wags its tail. In some ideologies, the tail obviously wags the dog.


Source:

Young Graphite in Old Rocks Challenges the Earliest Signs of Life. ScienceDaily 21 May 2011.