Wow, you know ICE was exposed for lying about this shit and misrepresenting the information...
Mount St. Helens & The ICR Radiometric Dating Controversy
1. The Event and the Claim
Following the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, a new lava dome formed in 1986. Because the rock cooled from lava just six years prior, its true "age" of solidification was an established historical fact.
In 1992, Dr. Steven Austin from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) collected a sample of this 10-year-old dacite rock. He sent it to Geochron Laboratories to be dated using the Potassium-Argon (K-Ar) radiometric dating method.
The lab results returned ages ranging from 340,000 to 2.8 million years old. Austin and the ICR used this to claim that radiometric dating is fundamentally flawed and that geologists cannot be trusted when they claim the Earth is billions of years old.
2. The Scientific Debunking
Geologists quickly identified three fundamental methodological flaws in Austin's experiment:
A. The Methodological Limit (Wrong Tool for the Job)
Potassium-Argon dating is designed for rocks millions or billions of years old. The half-life of Potassium-40 is 1.25 billion years. A 10-year-old rock contains so little Argon-40 that it falls below the minimum detection limits of the equipment. Using K-Ar dating on a 10-year-old rock is like trying to weigh a single penny on a truck scale designed for semi-trucks—you will get an erratic and inaccurate reading simply because you used the wrong instrument.
B. Excess Argon
The K-Ar method assumes 100% of the argon gas escapes when magma erupts. However, when lava cools very rapidly on the surface, some of the argon dissolved in the magma under high pressure gets trapped inside the rapidly forming rock before it can escape. This "excess argon" artificially inflates the age of the rock. Geologists are well aware of this and do not use standard K-Ar dating on incredibly young, rapidly cooled rocks.
C. Dating Older Crystals (Phenocrysts)
Magma is not perfectly melted. As it sits underground for centuries, high-melting-point minerals (like pyroxene) crystallize while the rest remains liquid. These older, solid crystals are called phenocrysts. The 1986 eruption carried these ancient crystals to the surface encased in new lava. Austin specifically concentrated and dated these older crystals. The 2.8-million-year date wasn't a failure of the method; it accurately reflected that he was dating ancient crystals formed long before the 1986 eruption.
3. Conclusion and Modern Methods
Austin's experiment did not disprove radiometric dating. It merely confirmed that if you intentionally apply a dating method outside of its known limits, to a sample contaminated with older materials and trapped gas, you will get an anomalous result.
Today, modern geology relies on Argon-Argon (40Ar/39Ar) dating. This method uses step-heating to mathematically detect if "excess argon" is present, allowing geologists to separate it from the argon produced by actual radioactive decay, resulting in highly accurate dating.
And no Radiometric dating is not inaccurate. I'll provide detailed explanations if you want. I've got a lot of information from actually researching this topic. Seems you don't.