Dating Mt St Helens

McCarrick, Allan (MCCARRIC@mailgate.navsses.navy.mil)
Fri, 01 May 1998 08:13 EST

On 4/30/98 Dario wrote that he would like to see some dates of buried
materials from Mt St Helens. Well it just so happens that I had that
topic come up recently. Here are at sources:

The claim that lava was dated by K-Ar to approximately 1 million years.
This was done by Steve Austin and "published" in Creation Ex Nihilo
Technical Journal (sometime in 1997). I found it at

http://www.icr.org/research/sa/sa-r01.htm

It may be that he really dated inclusions in the lava, and other work has
shown that they are not reset (I assume not completely melted) and retain
some of their own old Ar. A discussion of new lava dating old can be
found at

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/hawaii/html

It is interesting to note that the info in the second site referred data
published in 1968 !! It seems that those using K-Ar methods already knew
of problems (or inappropriateness) of K-Ar dating very young materials.

Al McCarrick