Soul Invictus

I saw in a thread a while back that a thread that made mention to trees in the SW US with rings that go back at least 9000 years(dendrochronology). Also with bogs in Ireland and that icecaps in Greenland and Antarctica go back some odd 100,000 years.

I found this interesting on two points. When I speak with very religious people about the age of the earth, it is natural for them to attack the dating systems that are man-made. I've recently found out that there is a distinction in two particular dating systems- qualitative (this came before that) and quantitative (this is X years old) I would personally wish to discuss the qualitative dating for purposes of validating issues in the whole "predating" issues that may surmise, however the most natural dating systems....that of nature would be hard or difficult for any hardcore fundamentalist to deny, because this would be nature at work...something not subject to error on mans part nor subject to manipulation, due to someone's adenda. In the issues of the rings and layers, they either are or aren't correct? That's why I would find it easier to argue on those two grounds (qualitative dating, dendrochronology, and various observations of natural dating processes) than dealing with the quantitative dating systems, because I have so many things to try to understand and understanding this especially scientific field is a bit much for me to take on at this time. I was hoping that you could provide me some sources that may help aid me in my studies..

judge

As far as I am aware there is no one tree that has this many rings. More than one tree is (are?) joined together to give a date going back so far. There is always the chance that they have not been joined correctly.

It certainly would be a lot more convincing to have one tree trunk with 9000 rings, that's for sure.

lpetrich

True, one does have to compare several trees to go back that far in time, but if one has enough trees on hand, they will overlap enough so one can perform multiple cross-checks. Furthermore, C-14 dating is good for indicating approximate ages, so one does not compare a 3000-year-old tree and a 6000-year-old one.

Also, here's a nice site about dating methods:

Superposition
Stratigraphy
Dendrochronology
Radiocarbon C14
Radiometric Dating Methods
Obsidian Hydration Dating
Paleomagnetic/Archaeomagnetic
Luminescence Dating Methods
Amino Acid Racemization
Fission-track Dating
Ice Cores
Varves
Pollens
Corals
Cation Ratio
Fluorine Dating
Patination
Oxidizable Carbon Ratio
Electron Spin Resonance
Cosmic-ray Exposure Dating

ps418

That's right. The signature of ring thickness variability allows for pretty confident correlation. And the correlation of 14C dates with the tree ring series dates is further, strong evidence for the validity of the tree ring series. And the fact that the whole tree ring series agrees so well with much longer time series constructed using entirely different principles, such as varves and ice core records, argues strongly for the valdity of each of the chronologies. My article on paleoclimate proxy records covers some of this, albeit in a cursoryt fashion (I badly need to update this article).

Patrick

Coragyps

The Lake Suigetsu record that Patrick discusses in his linked article is, IMHO, the big spike in the heart of the vampire of YEC: 250 carbon-14 dates correlated through 45,000 hand-counted sediment layer pairs. (Nearly makes me want to be a grad student again ) The Kitigawa paper is free online at www.sciencemag.org if you register and then search.

Soul Invictus

I'm very unknowledgable in aging aspects, so forgive my ignorant synopsis of the post I read.

lpetrich

I suggest that you take a closer look at my comment and ps418's; I think that both ps418 and I have made a good response to "judge".