CD011.6: C14 date of old oil

Claim CD011.6:

Coal and oil are supposedly millions of years old. Effectively all of the carbon-14 in a sample would have decayed in that time. But carbon-14 still exists in coal, implying an age of only about 50,000 years.

Source:

Baumgardner, John, 2003. Carbon dating undercuts evolution's long ages. Impact #364 (Oct.), http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=117
Baumgardner, J. R., D. R. Humphreys, A. A. Snelling, and S. A. Austin, 2003. Measurable ¹⁴C in fossilized organic materials: Confirming the young earth creation/Flood model. in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, R. E. Walsh, ed., Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, pp. 127-142.

Response:

New ¹⁴C is formed from background radiation, such as radioactivity in the surrounding rocks. In some cases, ¹⁴C from the atmosphere can contaminate a sample. A few processes that can add "modern" ¹⁴C to coal are:
- Sulfur bacteria, which commonly grow in coal.
- Secondary carbonates from groundwater that form on fracture surfaces.
- Whewellite, a carbon-containing mineral, that often forms as coal weathers.
Minute amounts of contamination from these sources can cause apparent ages around 50,000 years, which is near the limit of the maximum age that carbon dating can measure.

Links:

Hunt, Kathleen, 2002. Carbon-14 in coal deposits. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/c14.html

References:

Hunt, K., 2000. (see above)

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created 2003-5-25, modified 2004-10-25