Joel Kontinen
In February a thunderstorm in Japan had unexpected consequences. Teruari Enoto, an astrophysicist at Kyoto University, and his colleagues discovered that lightning produced more atmospheric radiocarbon.
A news article in Nature states:
“The main source of the carbon-14 in the atmosphere has generally been considered to be cosmic rays. In principle, lightning could also contribute to the supply. But it is not clear yet how much of the isotope is produced in this way, says Enoto, in part because it’s possible that not all bolts initiate photonuclear reactions.”
Many evolutionists used to think that radiometric dating methods were reliable, but a number of studies have shown that they were wrong.
This applies to several dating methods and their basic assumptions.
Geologists will now admit that zircon crystals, ultrasonic cavitation and even solar flares can skew dates.
In addition, science publications have suggested that the uranium-lead method and some other methods tend to give too old dates.
Radiocarbon dating is a special case, as it does not give dates in the millions of years due to its relative short half-life of approximately 5,730 years.
Nonetheless, the Japanese study suggests we should be a bit more critical of radiocarbon dates as well.
Source:
Castelvecchi, Davide. 2017. Lightning makes new isotope. Nature News (22 November).
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