Dating Rocks Of The Grand Canyon Essay

Dating Rocks of the Grand Canyon

Prior to 1896, many old-earth scientists speculated the Earth to be only one hundred million years old. Through Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity, scientists like Arthur Holmes and Ernest Rutherford developed a radiometric dating method by measuring isotopes to date rocks. For the first time, old-earth scientist would use these methods to date the Earth over a billion years old. (DiPietro, 2013, p. 332) “However, more recent old-earth discoveries revealed rocks that formed the Grand Canyon walls have a much longer history that extends back almost two billion years.” (DiPietro, 2013, p. 328) Since these methods were discovered, radiometric dating have been exploding across geological literature. (Meldahl, 2011, p. 228) Even more recent are the young-earth scientists that challenge the dating of rocks through the following questions:

1. Could isotopes be more vulnerable through natural processes that have not yet been experimented with? (Leddra, 2010, p. 48)

2.

Although, many old-earth scientists are starting to subscribe to a world-wide catastrophic flood, many still hold to their belief that “carbon-14 dating only works on materials younger than about 70,000 years old.” (Meldahl, 2011, p.231) The Great Unconformity in the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon dates to around 1.8 billion years old. In 1788 James Hutton and John Playfair, with their mathematical calculations, disagreed with Archbishop Ussher’s scriptural chronology that the Earth was only 5,792 years old. When rocks in the Grand Canyon are placed on a vertical timeline, “the unconformities between the rock units represent larger geological times than the actual dating or rocks themselves.” (Meldahl, 2011, p. 222) Based on this view, modern old-earth scientists have updated their estimate for the Earth’s age to be 4.56 billions years old. (Meldahl, 2011, p.