"What I thought was an old woman came stumbling in clutching a dead baby to her bosom, she was blind, her eyes fused shut with burns ... clothes hung in charred strips off her upper torso ... as I began to examine her, I realized in horror, what I thought were rags hanging from her face and neck was skin, burnt to a crisp ... it took her a whole day to die"

"We walked toward the river.  And on the way we saw many victims.  I saw a man whose skin was completely peeled off the upper half of his body and a woman whose eye balls were sticking out.  Near my house I saw a women and her baby lying dead on the side of the road ... their skin completely peeled off. It took me a few seconds before I recognized them they were so badly burned ... it was my mother and baby brother ...


If it hadn't been recognized by the world before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, science  now took the global stage by storm as the key to power and success. BUT it also revealed itself to be a devastating, double-edged sword. The sharpness of that blade is often determined by which end of the cutting edge one finds oneself on, and the winners of WW2 scrambled to secure the blunt hilt of the blade lest they perish by it's keener side. For allied soldiers who were spared the gruesome task of storming Japan's beaches, the Manhattan Project was a life saver. For those on the other side of the bomb bay doors of the Enola Gay and Bocks Car, it was a different story. But regardless of the carnage, in fact mostly because of it, the developed world now embraced science with renewed gusto. Americans from small town to big city prided themselves on having the best science and scientists in the world.

Through the 1950s, the government coffers opened wide, encouraging ground breaking research into both atomic physics and aerospace technology. But the emphasis was mostly at the University level and on military/commercial applications. That would change almost overnight: On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet News Agency TASS reported the triumph of Sputnik. The Russians had beaten the US in one of the most scientifically dramatic ways imaginable by launching a small satellite into orbit. This was no state sponsored propaganda spin; it was the real thing. Throngs of people from the world over scrutinized the night skies to see the tiny speck of light as it whizzed overhead with their own eyes. And for the first time the US government began putting serious resources into science education starting in kindergarten and following through to high school.

There, on the table, the few grams of material she had painstakingly refined from tons of pitchblende over the last six months sat quietly in the shadows. An eerie, bluish light, the glow of dying atoms, seeping into the gloom. In a flash of brilliant insight, Marie Curie realized that the new concept of radioactivity meant far more than x-rays, and nothing in atomic physics would ever be the same ...

Madame Curie would receive the recognition her genius and perseverance deserved. She was awarded not one but two Nobel Prizes, one in Physics and one in Chemistry for, among other discoveries, her curious isolate which she named Radium. But the fame and knowledge was gained at a great personal price. Both Madame Curie and her husband suffered debilitating symptoms and died fairly young after mysterious illnesses that were probably the result of years of exposure to radioactive materials.

Atomic physics was built on the pioneering work of Madame Curie and many others, and by the end of World War Two the scientists had more to show for their work than the deadly mushroom clouds that briefly bloomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A number of fruitful radiometric dating technologies had been developed.

You can learn all the basics about radiometric dating in this basic tutorial by Richard Wiens. But for the purposes of my essay we'll keep it simple stupid; Substance X slowly turns into substance Y over time. Let's say that it takes one million years for half of substance X to turn into substance Y. It doesn't matter how much of substance X you have. It could be ten metric tons, or it could be less than an ounce. In one million years half of it will turn into substance Y regardless. We would say one million years is the half-life of substance X. Understanding that, it's pretty clear that if you have a rock which contains equal amounts of X and Y, and if you can be sure that there was no contamination of Y in there to start with, then you know that rock formed one million years ago. If you have a sample which contains one part X for three parts Y, then two half lives have elapsed and the sample is two million years old, etc.

There are all kinds of clever ways geologist use to determine the initial amounts of Y. The details get fairly technical. But just as one example, sometimes you have a substance X half of which that turns into substance Y over P number of years, and half of Y goes on to turn into substance Z over Q number of years. By comparing the ratios of X, Y, and Z, you can get an idea of how much your sample was contaminated by Y which did not come from the decay of X. ¹

Earth scientists must have felt like a kid in a candy store in the 1950s. Radiometric dating did for geology and paleontology what the microscope had done for biology. The new techniques were put to work dating everything geologists and paleontologists could get funding for. Radiocarbon 14 dating was useful on relatively young objects that had once been alive, because Carbon 14 had a half-life of 5760 years. Potassium-Argon dating use Potassium to Argon decay, with a half-life of 1.26 billion years, and thus useful for dating older material. Uranium 238 decays into lead 206 with a half-life of 4.5 billion years and so is useful for dating the earth or meteorites.  Fossils could be dated by rocks found in the same layers, or in layers above and below them; many rocks and minerals could be dated directly. It was found that the earth was billions of years old; the dinosaurs arose almost 200 million years ago and disappeared 65 million years ago; before them clunky Permian reptiles were three-hundred million years old; fish and clams often came in at four hundred million years old; the oldest life exceeded three billions years in age; the oldest hominid remains known in the 1950s and 60s were over one million years old; meteorites came in at a whopping four to five billion years old! It was a heyday for geologists and paleontologists.

Young Earth Creationists obviously have an enormous problem with radiometric dating because it, errr ... well it destroys their nonsense utterly. Not to be the kind of folks to give up, they've developed all sorts of dodges to try and discredit it. One of the more commonly seen is the claim that 'researchers dated a living snail using carbon 14 dating and found it was 2000 years old! ... this shows how inaccurate and useless radiodating is .. " The actual incident is has never been identified as far as I know, but the basic information is plausible. There's a very good reason why no researcher would ever sue Carbon 14 to date a fresh water snail or clam. Radiocarbon 14 dating measures the ration of carbon 12 to carbon 14 in the sample. Atmospheric carbon contains a known and fixed amount of carbon 14 Vs carbon 12, and carbon 14 turns into carbon 12 with a half-life of just over 5700 years. But most mollusks form their shells from carbon compounds dissolved in water. And if that body of water happens to be relatively small, and in contact with limestone-which is highly likely as limestone is a very common surface rock-then much of that carbon incorporated into the shell as the creature grows will originate from the calcium carbonate dissolved form that limestone. The limestone is going to be much older than a few thousand years, and thus any dates obtained by using radiocarbon 14 on samples which have been formed out of it will yield an erroneously old date. Using radiocarbon 14 on a snail's shell makes about as much sense as trying to determine when the Washington monument was built by using radiometric dating on the granite it's made out of!

Another famous example quoted by creationists is that of a date obtained from a sample taken from a pyroclastic flow in Hawaii known to have solidified a little over one-hundred years ago. The sample they 'happened' to pick however was a xenolithic inclusion, a piece of rock which had not melted, and thus the date they obtained would be the date that rock solidified long ago, before being coughed up by the lava flow!

In both cases above, and all too many like them, the creationist authors who presented these examples are well aware of the issues surrounding the dates, Lord knows we've told them often enough. And the first wave of Young Earth Creationists were men like Henry Morris and Dwayne Gish who both held doctorates in hard science. To think they couldn't grasp the duplicity of those arguments is a bit of a stretch. What's far more plausible is they didn't care about accuracy or honesty. Their goal is a political one, not a matter of science. And of course there is the financial incentive; conning the sincere believer has always been profitable, but few realize just how profitable. Some insight into that normally guarded cash flow was provided when Young Earth Evangelist Kent Hovind was forced to release his tax records in 2004 as part of a lawsuit against him from the IRS. My fellow Creationist hunters and I had always assumed fleecing the faithful was lucrative, why else would anyone work so hard at it? But we had no idea, we were thinking small potatoes ... Hovind grossed a cool million dollars plus in 2003 alone!

DarkSyde

It wasn't long before marine geologists and petrogeologists began dating samples brought up from deep water expeditions and drilling projects. And they began to notice a pattern. While the ages from continental material ranged from a few million to a billion years or more, in the ocean far from shore, the figures were always less than two or three hundred million years old, and often far younger. Moreover, as data accumulated it became clear that the closer they got to a coastline, the older the deep ocean samples were. While those taken from the middle of the Atlantic were far younger. It was as though rock was being created out there, in the black depths, and proceeding conveyor belt like to the edges of the continents.
Sonar imaging and deep water exploration both by pure science and commercial interests revealed deep trenches and mid-oceans ridges encircling the earth like the seams on a baseball.

The new data produced a sort of musical chairs type rush among geologists. But two theorists, Harry Hess and Robert Deitz, were the first to put it all together coherently in peer reviewed papers outlining what they first called 'sea floor spreading'. Finally, at long last, Alfred Wegener's idea of continental drift was vindicated.

The picture that emerged was both elegant and grand. At midocean ridges where the crust is thinnest, new material wells up from the molten interior and spreads away from the ridge. It flows conveyor belt like across the sea floor until it collides with a continental edge. There it forms a crevice as the heavier sea floor material subducts under the lighter continental rock-which is floating high like giant ice berg in an ocean of liquid stone.

The new Theory was soon called Plate Tectonics, and the more geologists learned, the more it explained damn near everything they'd been perplexed over for two-hundred years or more. Mountains form where plates collide and crumple up the land; earthquakes occur where plates are in contact at the edges as they slip and grind past each other; volcanoes form at the edges, and occasionally in the middle if a convection cell from deep beneath the moving plate burns through; and continents are pushed and pulled to and fro by the moving sea floor producing continental drift. Plate Tectonics is the unifying theory for all of geology. The ultimate triumph of Lyell and Hutton's uniformism. It serves as an excellent metaphor for evolutionary biology in many ways, both in the time scales involved and the nature by which past plate movement is inferred. It's fun for me when talking to an old earther who accepts geology but rejects evolution and common descent to steer the conversation to Plate Tectonics, mention I accept "Micro-continental drift' and then soberly turn to him or her and state with feigned sorrow that there are some real problems with materialist "Macro-tectonics or Wegenerism; besides, no one has ever seen a continent move across halfway across the earth nor has anyone ever recreated it in a lab!'

"We are sailors each, one and all. The terrestrial stage may seem implacable, the epitome of stability and permanence; this is an illusion. You and I, and all we know, are castaways on grand luxury liners which ply an ancient sea. But our ship is no mere ephemeral mortal construct of wood and metal bobbing in a solution of salt. We journey through time on the backs of mighty rafts of granite and basalt, crafted over eons by relentless forces, each weighing trillions of tons, stretching for thousands of miles, adrift in a global ocean of roiling lava and white-hot liquid steel.  Our earthen vessels are but fragile skiffs, paper thin, congealed skins of rock and mineral shielding us lovingly from the hellish inferno a scant few dozen miles beneath our feet." Creationism & Geology, Part One.

Plate Tectonics would revolutionize our understanding not just of geology, but of the history of life on earth. And variants of Plate Tectonics would even be applied to the geophysics of other worlds. The science is new enough that Young Earth Creationists really don't know what to make of it. Mostly they never mention it in anyway. But the redheaded stepchild of Young Earthism, Catastrophism, was not dead and buried. In a few years it would come roaring back in two new forms. One was organized Young Earthism which grew strong if perhaps off the radar screen for the time being. The other was fully legitimate and terrifying in its scope. The latter would claim a meaningful victory, illuminate one of the unsolved mysteries in paleontology and in the process underscore the vulnerability of our biological world. All this by revealing an ancient cataclysm that would rival any science fiction nightmare dreamed up by generations of authors.

¹Additional information: "Read a little bit about isochron methods. This is a very clever approach to radiometric dating that uses multiple isotopes of the same element, and multiple samples from the same rock (but with different chemical compositions) ... One nice aspect of isochron methods: if there are problems with the samples used for the measurement (e.g. some of them have been contaminated after the rock formed), in most cases, you won't be able to determine a date from the rock. Basically, it's hard to get a "false" date from the method. Or, put a little differently, getting a good set of isochron data is a good sign that the sample, in fact, has not been contaminated or otherwise altered with in some way." ColoRambler