The age of things is crucial in the debate over the authority of the Bible. Most methods that could be used for calculating the Earth’s age, even though still based on unprovable uniformitarian assumptions, give upper limits much less than the billions of years required for evolution. Evolutionists widely use radioisotope (or radiometric) dating of rocks to support the ‘geologic time’ figure of 4.6 billion years. Notwithstanding the inherent unreliability and demonstrated inaccuracy of the radiometric dating techniques, ages of rock formations in the millions (and billions) of years are presented as fact in schools, universities and the media.

However, there is spectacular, but little-known, evidence that is completely inconsistent with the evolutionary timescale, but entirely consistent with the Biblical record of a young Earth and a catastrophic global Flood. The evidence is provided by radio-halos in coalified wood. This work has been published in some of the best peer-reviewed scientific journals, and its strong case against evolution’s millions of years is so far unanswered by the evo­lutionary community.

What are radiohalos?

Radiohalos are spherical, micro­scopic-sized discolorations in crystals. They are found abundantly in certain minerals in Earth’s rocks, especially micas from granites. In cross-section on a microscope slide, they appear as a series of tiny concentric rings, usually surround­ing a central core. This central core is (at least initially) radioactive. High-energy alpha particles, emitted from the core during radioactive decay, damage the mineral and discolor it, with most of the damage occurring where the particle stops. How far this particle travels depends on its energy. Since all the alpha particles from a particular type of decay reaction have the same energy, and the particles are fired in all directions, a spherical shell of discoloration will form, appearing circular in cross-section.

Imagine shooting a bullet into a huge lump of cork. Eventually, the bullet will stop, leaving behind a ‘trail’ of damage, the length of which depends on the speed of the bullet. Different radioactive sub­stances shoot alpha particles (‘bullets’) at different (though specific) speeds, so we can identify the substance from the diameter of the ‘sphere of damage’.4 The higher the energy of decay, the faster the speed of the ‘bullet’.

Uranium radiohalos

Radioactive uranium generates a beautiful, multi-ringed halo because it decays in a number of steps. Of the 15 isotopes (or varieties of ele­ments) in this ‘decay chain,’ eight emit alpha particles when they decay, forming eight rings. It is a bit like a sequence of guns, each of different power, firing an eight-gun salute. When this salute, or decay chain, is fired millions of times in every direction, the bullets from the different guns make eight concentric rings.

If, instead of radioactive uranium, the core were composed of an isotope along the chain, there would be fewer rings. Omitting the first few isotopes in the decay series would be like removing the first few guns in our ‘salute’. Thus it’s quite simple to work out which isotope was originally in the core by counting the rings. Polonium-218 forms three rings, polonium-214 forms two, and polonium-2l0 forms only one.

Radiohalos in coalified wood

Radiohalos have also been found in logs recovered from uranium mines on the Colorado Plateau of Western USA. The logs, partially turned to coal, were found in uraniurn-rich sedimentary rocks from three different geological forma­tions. Some of these formations had prev­iously been assigned radiometric ‘dates’ ranging from 55 to 80 million years. Scientists Jedwab and Breger des­cribed these halos, and Dr Robert Gentry, a world authority on radiohalos, revisited their work. Following extensive investi­gation, Gentry published his results in the prestigious journal Science, in a book and in a video.

Most of the halos found in the wood had only one ring, indicating that the radioactive cores once contained polon­ium-210 — the last radioactive isotope in the uranium-238 decay chain. Clearly, the wood had been saturated in uranium-rich solutions, and certain spots attracted polonium atoms (also present in these solutions), allowing small cores of polonium-2l0 to form. As they decayed, these cores left the characteristic polonium-2l0 halo. The solutions must have pene­trated the logs relatively quickly, certainly within a year or so. How do we know that! Because the half-life of polonium-210 is only 138 days. That is, within 138 days, half the poloniurn-210 present would have decayed into the next 'daughter' isotope in the chain. In other words, the solution had saturated the wood within two or three half-lives, about a year. It could not have taken very long because in 10 half-lives (less than four years) virtually all of the polonium-210 would have been gone. Only one of the three radioactive iso­topes of polonium was deposited in the tiny radioactive specks in the logs. We know because only one ring formed. The other isotopes from the decay chain (polonium-214 and poloniurn-2l8) were missing. Why? They had already decayed away. Their half-lives are very short (164 millionths of a second and three minutes respectively). So all polon­ium-214 would have disappeared within a thousandth of a second, and all polon­ium-218 would have gone in an hour — long before the uranium-rich solutions could saturate the logs.

Significantly, the halos were mainly elliptical, not circular. Obviously, after the halos formed, the wooden logs were compressed, squashing the originally circular halos into ellipses. Sometimes a circular halo could be seen together with an elliptical halo (Figure 3). This indicated that radioactive polonium-210 continued to decay from the same core after the wood was com­pressed. Thus, because of the 138-day half-life of polonium-2l0 as discussed above, there was less than four years between when the solution first infiltrated the wood and when it was compressed. (The presence of the second halo at the same spot shows that much less than four years had passed before the compression event, as there was still time to produce another halo afterwards.)

An amazing event

The wood in which these tiny ellip­tical halos were found speaks of a dev­astating flood that uprooted and smashed huge trees, depositing the debris with an enormous volume of sediment over a large area. The halos themselves tell the story of an unusual geologic event. They speak of uranium-rich solutions saturating the logs in less than a year or so, forming tiny specks of polonium, which decayed to produce circular radiohalos, which were, in much less than four years, com­pressed and deformed.

The story is one of exceptional geo­logical conditions—a highly unusual sequence of events. For one thing, in the usual ‘slow and gradual’ scenarios, it would take much longer for sufficient sediment to accumulate on top to deform the wood in this way. What is really amazing and significant, however, is the fact that this elliptical halo situation has been found in three different geological formations in the same general region. Evolutionists say these formations repres­ent three different geological periods ranging from 35 to 245 million years. To believe this millions-of-years time-scale, we would need to believe that this amazing sequence of events (with all its precise timing) occurred three different times, separated by more than 200 mil­lion years. Clearly, this is an incredible scenario. It makes more sense to believe that the sequence occurred once, and that all the sedimentary formations were deposited in the same catastrophe, followed by the same earth movement causing deformation. These polonium halos collapse the ‘long ages’ of geology, and point to the unique, catastrophic Flood recorded in the Bible. Also, by the same reasoning, these halos leave little room for numerous layers of post-flood sedimentation as suggested by some authors.

More confirming evidence

Further confirmation of this spec­tacular collapse of geologic time is pro­vided by careful analysis of the tiny cores of some uranium halos found in the same wood samples. This revealed a large amount of uranium-238, but almost no lead-206. If the halos were millions of years old, much more ‘(laughter’ lead should have been present. The scarcity of the daughter element, using the same assumptions upon which radiometric dating is based, would indicate that the halos are only several thousand years old. not millions. Similar results were obtained for halos from all three geolog­ical formations, indicating that all are approximately the same age. Again, the supposed millions of years of geologic time collapse into only a few thousand.

Dinosaur tracks

Fossilized dinosaur footprints have been found in these Colorado mines. In Cyprus Plateau Mine (Utah). a fossilized dinosaur footprint was found in the coal seam next to one of the many coalified logs of the plateau. In Kenilworth Mine, eight different types of dinosaur tracks were found. The pattern of tracks suggests that the animals were fleeing from an imminent catastrophe. Nearby, a huge dinosaur graveyard has been found at Dinosaur National Monument (Vernal, Utah) in Jurassic sediments. Obviously, the dinosaurs that made these tracks didn’t escape. The catastr­ophe got them. The collapse of geologic time and the young age for the rock formations confirm that these dinosaurs lived on Earth, at the same time as man, only a few thousand years ago.

Conclusion

This scientific evidence, presented in leading journals, is a major problem for the idea of ‘millions of years’. It is, how­ever, consistent with the vast fossil bearing, sedimentary rock deposits of the Colorado Plateau having been laid down rapidly by the catastrophic global Flood described in the Bible, some 4,300 years ago. The dinosaurs that left footprints on the plateau, and were then buried and fossilized in the nearby rocks, also lived then — at the same time as man.

Radioactive Decay

Radioactive isotopes have an intrinsically unstable atomic struc­ture which makes them disintegrate so that particles fly out. One way that a parent radio­active atom can decay into a daughter atom is by ejecting an alpha particle from its nucleus. Sometimes the daughter element is also unstable and sub­sequently decays into another unstable iso­tope, and so on in a series of steps—a ‘de­cay chain’.

The isotope uranium-238 starts a decay chain that disintegrates step-by-step into a stable form of lead. It involves fifteen isotopes and fourteen steps (diagram above). Different isotopes of the same element (e.g. uranium-238 and uranium-235) have a different mass but nearly identical chemical behavior. An alpha particle is a helium nucleus with a mass of 4 atomic mass units. Thus, radioactive decay by emission of an alpha particle (e.g. uranium-238) produces a daughter isotope (thorium-234) which is 4 atomic mass units lighter. The half-life of a radioactive isotope is the time required for half its atoms to decay. Different isotopes have different half lives (e.g. the half-life of uranium­238 is 4.5 billion years and of polonium-218 is 3 minutes).

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