Re: [asa] Oklo as the graveyard of YEC

In a message dated 4/17/07 5:24:38 PM, randyisaac@comcast.net writes:

>
> Kirk,
>
>  
>
> There are cases where isotopic ratios have a specific physical cause. There
> are quite a few cases where physical behavior (more so than chemical
> behavior which depends on the electron valence states) depends on the weight of the
> nucleus. Diffusion rates, as you mentioned, are a very good example. They
> depend on the isotopic mass. Another is the evaporation rate of water. A small
> percent of water is O-18 based instead of O-16. About 0.2% to be exact. The
> evaporation rate of O-18 based water has a slightly different temperature
> dependence than O-16 water. This leads to a different O-18/O-16 ratio in
> evaporated ocean water in summer than in winter. That leads to a slightly different
> ratio in the snowfall in Greenland which leads to differences in the annual
> layers of ice. Hence, ice cores have an elegant method of detecting annual
> layers using isotope ratios.
>
>  
>
> Examples of this kind are not uncommon.
>
>

Yes, I agree that there are lots of physical causes for variations in
isotopic ratios. Most of these cause relatively small variations. (I am familiar
with a number of such subtle effects for 14-C, having done a postdoc in a
radiocarbon AMS lab.)

Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous post, so I'll try to restate it. My
point was: let's assume a fully formed creation with apparent age. Then why do
we see large variations in abundance of radioactive isotopes?
1) We might expect to see small variations for the reasons mentioned above.
But we see much larger variations, which coincidentally track with
independent age estimates.
2) Perhaps there was some functional reason that God needed to make different
isotopic ratios for different apparently-aged rock formations. But what
functional reason could this be? The various isotopes of an element are nearly
identical in any functional sense.
Conclusion: I don't see any good explanation for large variations in isotopic
ratios from an "apparent age" perspective. An apparent age proponent is
almost forced to take the position that God was deceptive, as George pointed out
earlier.

Kirk

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Received on Wed Apr 18 00:11:25 2007