200 Year Old Lava Dated 2.96 Billion Years Old?

The Creation Science Institute tells us in “How Do You Date a Volcano?” by Robert Doolan:

Researchers found similar conflict in Hawaii. A lava flow that is known to have taken place in 1800-1801 — less than 200 years ago — was dated by potassium-argon as being 2,960 million years old. (3) If the real dates had not been reasonably well established by other means, who could have proved that the potassium-argon dates were so wrong?

…

3. J. G. Funkhouser and J. J. Naughton, "He and Ar in ultramafic inclusions", Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 73, 1968, pp. 4601-4607.

This is a paper that the creationists love to cite. And yet the citation is out-of-context. That cited paper on page 4603 tells us:

The matrix rock of the Hualalai nodules was erupted during 1801–1802 [Richter and Murata, 1961] and, indeed, can be said to contain no measurable radiogenic argon within experimental error (Table 2)…

What this means is that the lava was, in this particular study, dated to zero age within the margin of error. (This is not surprising since the rate of radioactive decay in potassium-argon method are very slow and the instrumentation was not as good as it is today. Think of using the hour hand of a watch to time a ten-yard dash.)

Thus the creationist have lied about, or did not understand the contents of this paper. The two-hundred year old lava was not what scientists were trying to date. What was being studied were xenoliths (also called inclusions). What these are bits of rock that are embedded within the lava flow. These rocks are older than the lava flow. They were carried up by the magma, but the magma was not hot enough to melt them. Thus one should not be surprised that these bits of rock date older than two centuries old since they are well over two centuries old. Furthermore the study was trying to see in this dating technique is appropriate for xenoliths. They found that it was not. One of the problems which they had was “excess argon.” Don Lindsay has another presentation on this issue.

“The Achilles Heel of Interpreting the Past” tells the same story.

“Exact Dating (More or Less)” again citing the Funkhouser and Naughton mentioned above tells us:

The Kaupelehu Flow (1800 - 1801 A.D.) has been dated several times, yielding 12 dates ranging from 140 million years to 2.96 billion years, with an average date of 1.41 billion years.

Wayne Jackson in his “The Age of the Earth” tells us:

Studies on submarine basaltic rocks from Hawaii, known to have formed less than two hundred years ago, when dated by the potassium-argon method, yielded ages from 160 million to almost 3 billion years (Funkhouser, p. 4601).

Dave Greear, again citing that paper, tells us here that:

As proof of the unreliability of the radiometric methods consider the fact that in nearly every case dates from recent lava flows have come back excessively large. One example is the rocks from the Kaupelehu Flow, Hualalai Volcano in Hawaii which was known to have erupted in 1800-1801. These rocks were dated by a variety of different methods. Of 12 dates reported the youngest was 140 million years and the oldest was 2.96 billion years. The dates average 1.41 billion years. [48]

And of course he does not mention that matrix around the xenoliths, i.e. the lava flow, did not date to any of dates which Greear cited. His statement that nearly every dating of historic lava flows is “excessively large” is also false. G. Brent Dalrymple, an important worker in the field of radiometric dating, and a man who has reviewed in several papers the results of radiometric dating of historic lava flows has disputed that. He¹ tells us (Ar is argon, K is potassium):

Thus the large majority of historic lava flows that have been studied either give correct ages, as expected, or have quantities of excess radiogenic ⁴⁰Ar that would be insignificant in all but the youngest rocks. The ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar technique, which is now used instead of K-Ar methods in most studies, has the capability of automatically detecting, and in many instances correcting for, the presence of excess ⁴⁰Ar, should it be present.

The so-called “excess argon” problem which the creationist like to crow about, which is responsible for most of the incorrect results of recent flows using the older K-Ar dating method. Before argon-argon dating became common this was a big problem for dating extremely young rocks via potassium-argon. Dalrymple² did one of the early studies on the application of potassium-argon to historic lava flows before argon-argon method largely solved the problem. He looked at 26 historic lava flows. One-third had excess argon, but the excess argon error in all but one was so small that the error caused would be utterly insignificant in a rock older than a few million years. (And some of the excess argon errors made the rocks too young.) The one lava flow which they found a large amount of excess argon that would still be significant in an older rock was samples from the 1800-1801 lava flow from Hawaii that dated 1.19 and 1.05 million years. Dalrymple pointed out that this was not unexpected, citing Funkhouser and Naughton’s work showing the xenoliths have excess argon. (The samples included the xenoliths as well as matrix. One advance since that study is the ability test far smaller samples, often single crystals that can solve many problems like this one.) I will point out while 1.19 million years is significant to a professional geologist, even it is not that much in the grand order of things. If it turns out that the dinosaurs died out 1.19 million years earlier than the approximately 65 million years currently believed, I will not loose any sleep. The lava flow with the second greatest error at 0.22 million years would be utterly trivial for rocks as old as the dinosaurs. And as mentioned before the argon-argon technique largely solves the excess argon problem anyway: it can detect the problem and sometimes still give a good date in spite of the problem.

For a short a introduction to these methods please see Dr. Roger C. Wiens’s “Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective” and its sections on K-Ar and Ar-Ar dating. Chapter 3 of Dalrymple’s The Age of the Earth is an important resource as well. A really good article that deals with the lists of incorrect dates is Steven H. Schimmrich’s “Geochronology kata John Woodmorappe,” which is a must read if you are wondering about those lists. Glen Morton also makes a very important point about such lists (that they still correspond to mainstream geologic expectations) in his “Young-Earth Arguments: A Second Look.”

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