Carbon-14: Not Much Good Anymore

Radiocarbon (Carbon-14) dating is not the thing that believers in deep time use to affirm that Earth is old. This is a common mistake. Instead, C-14 is used to get a handle on the age of something organic. C-14 atoms are unstable, and their therapy is to break down into nitrogen-14, which is a random process (for more on how it works, see "Carbon-14 Dating — Understanding the Basics"). Since C-14 does not last a huge amount of time, it has been somewhat useful to approximate the ages of some things. It is helpful to corroborate it with historical artifacts.

Charcoal is almost entirely carbon, Pixabay / Rudy and Peter Skitterians

Carbon-14 itself is affected by conditions on Earth. Nuclear bomb experiments decades ago made big changes, but also gave scientists some calibration. However, that is dissipating. In addition, carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions is hindering the effectiveness of carbon-14. This will be problematic for old-Earth advocates, who are still dealing with the fact that "billions of years old" diamonds have, impossibly (to them), radiocarbon. Radiocarbon has defied deep time beliefs and supported recent creation.

While many have heard of carbon dating, they may not realize that it relies on a radiocarbon curve that is calibrated by atomic bomb tests in the 1960s. Those tests produced anomalously high levels of radioactive carbon-14. That spike has been a “silver lining of bomb testing” because it provided a recognizable “wiggle” in the calibration curve that enabled precise forensic dating of modern objects younger than the 1960s. Two factors have removed that benefit: the decay of bomb carbon-14, and the rise of fossil fuel burning that has put more CO2 into the air that is free of carbon-14.

Read it all and see what makes Darwin's disciples sad over at "Carbon Dating Is Becoming Useless."