CPT Q. 044: How did the RATE team deduce how much nuclear decay occurred during Creation Week?

Q. 44. How did the RATE team deduce how much nuclear decay occurred during Creation Week?

Extended question

I would like a bit more explanation regarding your comment below from your response to question 32:

We identified the first of the episodes as occurring during the formation of the earth but before plant life was created on Day 3. The second episode occurred during the Genesis Flood. The first episode involved a total of approximately four billion years’ worth of nuclear transmutation at today’s rates, while the second involved some 500-600 million years’ worth. We judged these conclusions to be extremely firm.

I would like to know how this conclusion was arrived at regarding how much accelerated radioactive decay took place in the first episode compared to the second episode. Is this judged from the volumes of rock of different geological periods? Are there rocks which were affected by both episodes of decay? If so how would we know which episode represents more decay? Also, a related question is, how do you envision the second episode of accelerated radioactive decay influencing the Flood?

Response: Let me begin by addressing the issue of just how much nuclear decay has occurred in the earth since God began to form it. Was it just a few thousand years’ worth at present rates, or much more than that? At the beginning of the RATE project, the team members had a divergence of viewpoints on that very crucial question. So one of the first projects we undertook was to apply fission track dating to an assortment of samples from different parts of the geological record. Fission tracks represent tangible, physical evidence for nuclear decay. The outcome of that preliminary fission track investigation was that indeed many tens of millions of years of nuclear decay, at presently measured rates, had taken place since the onset of the Flood in these rocks. Moreover, the fission track ages we obtained for these samples were in close agreement with the radioisotope dates for these same rocks. This study convinced those members of the RATE team who earlier had been somewhat uncertain about the reality of huge amounts—millions and even billions of years’ worth—of nuclear decay during earth history to accept this reality and to move on to the important task of explaining how this had occurred within the time span given by God in Scripture.

I do not want to go into detail summarizing the RATE project other than a few key points. Of course, our primary conclusion was that so much nuclear decay could fit into the Scriptural account of earth history only if it took place in highly accelerated episodes that did not entirely destroy the earth’s life. This seems to restrict the bulk of nuclear decay to two windows—(1) prior to the point in Day 3 when God created plant life and (2) during the Flood when the continents were covered by water which acted as a radiation shield.

Another important question is, how much nuclear decay products have the earth’s crustal rocks accumulated? If we consider igneous rocks erupted since the onset of the Flood, which is marked by the sudden appearance in the sediment record of fossils of multi-cellular organisms, we find such rocks contain as much as 550-600 million years’ worth of nuclear decay products. Hence, our working conclusion is that approximately that much accelerated nuclear decay must have accompanied the Flood event.

What about nuclear decay products in rocks that crystallized before the Flood? How much decay products to we find in these rocks? In our RATE studies, we did extensive analysis of zircons extracted from a drill core from the granitic basement at a site in north central New Mexico. The amount of accumulated radiogenic lead in the zircons from this core was consistently 1.5 billion years’ worth at today’s decay rates. (The truly exciting discovery was the large amount of radiogenic helium which these zircons still contained required that all the 1.5 billion years’ worth of nuclear decay must have taken place within the last 6000 years, based on the diffusion rate of helium through zircon.) Other RATE projects measured daughter products in other rocks which gave radioisotope ages even greater than that obtained for the New Mexico granite.

In 2001 S. A. Wilde et al., in a paper entitled “Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago,” Nature, 409, 175-178, 2001, reported a zircon enclosed in a metamorphosed sandstone conglomerate in the Jack Hills of the Narryer Gneiss Terrane of Western Australia with a Pb-Pb age of 4.4 Ga. These authors in the same paper report several other zircons from the same formation with almost the same Pb-Pb age. The RATE team concluded that there is no good reason to question the reality of this much nuclear decay having occurred since the earliest moments of the earth’s existence. Zircons, because they are so hard, have such a high melting temperature, and, when they form exclude lead and helium, are entirely capable of recording this decay history.

So in regard to the first question, namely, how our conclusion was arrived at regarding how much accelerated radioactive decay took place in the first episode compared to the second episode, basically, our RATE studies verified that the measured radioisotope ‘age’ in most cases does indeed give the amount of nuclear decay in terms of today’s rates that a rock sample has experienced since it was formed or last metamorphosed. The earliest Flood rocks yield ‘ages’ of about 500-600 million years, while oldest rocks for the earth as a whole yield ‘ages’ approaching 4.5 billion years. This implies 500-600 million years’ worth of decay occurred in the second episode, and about 3900 million years occurred in the first episode.

Is this judged from the volumes of rock of different geological periods? No, it is a matter not of rock volume but rather of the radioisotopes and decay products the rocks contain.

Are there rocks which were affected by both episodes of decay? Certainly. Essentially all rocks with radioisotope ages greater than 600 million years were affected in their radioisotope patterns by both episodes of accelerated decay.

If so, how would we know which episode represents more decay? The decay products accumulate unless the rocks are metamorphosed, heated strongly in some other way, or strongly leached. Thus, apart from such confounding factors, the decay products generated in the first episode are still around and add to those produced in the second episode.

Also, a related question is, how do you envision the second episode of accelerated radioactive decay influencing the Flood? As we mention in our RATE books, the amount of heat released in this accelerated decay episode is so vast that God must have intervened to remove it, just as He must have intervened to cause the acceleration of the decay rates. We find little evidence for any significant heating of the rocks as a consequence of this decay acceleration. Thus, I do not include any influence of this accelerated nuclear decay in my modeling of the mechanics and thermodynamics of the Flood.