Potassium-argon dating has given many proven unreliable dates.
How do you date a volcano?
Quick-read this article:
Ages estimated for volcanoes in New Zealand and Hawaii that were
dated using the potassium-argon method were found to be wrong in
every case. This casts doubt on potassium-argon dating as a
reliable dating method.
There are more than 50 small volcanoes in the city and surrounding areas of Auckland, New Zealand. But the largest volcano of these is also the youngest. It is called Rangitoto. How young is this youngest volcano? Now your problem starts.
Rangitoto is generally regarded as young for several reasons. Evidence based on botany and geomorphology, and a hint from Maori legend that the name can mean “red sky,” contribute to a common acceptance that Rangitoto is youthful. Some of the lavas (scoria) have no vegetation, and seem to be no more than a few hundred years old.
According to a paper by McDougall, Polach, and Stipp in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, in the late 1960s scientists from the Australian National University dated numerous volcanoes in Auckland using the potassium-argon method. Ten samples from both vegetated and unvegetated lava on Rangitoto were dated. Results seemed to show that Rangitoto was not a few hundred years old, as it had appeared to be, because the potassium-argon ages from the 10 samples ranged from 146,000 years up to almost half a million years.
Dating conflict
So how old is Rangitoto? A couple of hundred years? Or half a million? It's a big difference.
The scientists took a sample of wood from under some Rangitoto lava and dated it by the carbon-14 method. The wood gave an age of only 225 years (plus or minus 110 years) — which potentially put it in the lifetime of George Washington and German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. This is roughly the age that all the evidence points to except potassium-argon dating.
If lava that is little more than 200 years old can be wrongly dated at up to 465,000 years by the potassium-argon method, could potassium-argon dating always be wrong?
The answer is probably “yes.” The scientists who did the Rangitoto tests dated 16 volcanoes in all. Eleven of these could be compared with carbon-14 dates. In every case the potassium-argon dates were clearly wrong to a huge extent.
Please note that these results do not stand or fall on the dating of xenoliths, as at least one critic has wrongly claimed, because in every case in which the potassium-argon dates could be compared with the carbon-14 dates, the potassium-argon dates were wrong. The problems for potassium-argon go much deeper, as a conference paper on anomalous potassium-argon dates shows.
Hawaiian problems
Researchers found similar confusion in Hawaii. A lava flow that is known to have taken place in 1800–1801 — little more than 200 years ago — was dated by potassium-argon as being 2960 million years old. If the real dates had not been reasonably well established by other means, who could have proved that the potassium-argon dates were so wrong?
So how do you date a volcano? The lesson seems to be that whichever way you date it, don't count on the potassium-argon method!
References- Ian McDougall, H. A. Polach and J. J. Stipp, “Excess radiogenic argon in young subaerial basalts from the Auckland volcanic field, New Zealand”, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Vol. 33, 1969, pp. 1485-1520.
- J. G. Funkhouser and J. J. Naughton, “He and Ar in ultramafic inclusions”, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 73, 1968, pp. 4601-4607.
Other topics of interest:
- Tuataras of New Zealand: Why haven't they evolved?
- Was the Tourmai fossil found in Chad really a missing link in human evolution?
- The last pterodactyl: Was it all a huge hoax?
- Did the extinct dodo help rare trees to survive?
- Coelacanth — the fish that refused to evolve!
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