[_ Old Earth _] Dendrochronology and You.

[ArtGuy]

Meet Methuselah. Methuselah is an ancient bristlecone pine tree. It is 4767 years old. We know this because we have directly counted the number of rings it has, and as most people know, a tree has one ring for each year of its life. In other words, we are pretty much 100% sure of the exact age of this particular tree.

This is The Flood. It wiped out every living creature on the planet. Given the salinity and pressure of the sea water that would've flooded over the entire globe, all plant life would've been killed. (Bathing a plant in a saline solution even a small fraction of the concentration of the oceans would kill a plant within a few hours, much less over 40 days.) The flood occured roughly 4300-4400 years ago.

So why is Methuselah still around?

 

[Khristeeanos]

Meet Methuselah. Methuselah is an ancient bristlecone pine tree. It is 4767 years old. We know this because we have directly counted the number of rings it has, and as most people know, a tree has one ring for each year of its life. In other words, we are pretty much 100% sure of the exact age of this particular tree.

This is The Flood. It wiped out every living creature on the planet. Given the salinity and pressure of the sea water that would've flooded over the entire globe, all plant life would've been killed. (Bathing a plant in a saline solution even a small fraction of the concentration of the oceans would kill a plant within a few hours, much less over 40 days.) The flood occured roughly 4300-4400 years ago.

So why is Methuselah still around?

Not every tree makes annual rings.

It is like saying the ice rings are annual rings and that is just not true.

Ever heard of the lost squadran? It landed on Greenland (or was it Iceland?) during WWII and they went back in the 90's to find it and it was under hundreds of rings of ice.

By the evolutionists clock, that would have been there before planes were invented.

 

[cubedbee]

Meet Methuselah. Methuselah is an ancient bristlecone pine tree. It is 4767 years old. We know this because we have directly counted the number of rings it has, and as most people know, a tree has one ring for each year of its life. In other words, we are pretty much 100% sure of the exact age of this particular tree.

This is The Flood. It wiped out every living creature on the planet. Given the salinity and pressure of the sea water that would've flooded over the entire globe, all plant life would've been killed. (Bathing a plant in a saline solution even a small fraction of the concentration of the oceans would kill a plant within a few hours, much less over 40 days.) The flood occured roughly 4300-4400 years ago.

So why is Methuselah still around?

Not every tree makes annual rings.

You're correct. Sometimes trees do not grow an annual ring, so if you count rings it is possible you are underestimating the age. However, there is no tree which grows more than one ring a year, so we can be confident that this tree is at least 4700 years old.

It is like saying the ice rings are annual rings and that is just not true.

It's called ice core dating.

Ever heard of the lost squadran? It landed on Greenland (or was it Iceland?) during WWII and they went back in the 90's to find it and it was under hundreds of rings of ice.

No, actually it wasn't. Here's your story. It was originally published in a creationist magazine.

Ice cores are taken by using a huge drill to drill down and pull out an enormous section of ice, and then the layers are individually counted. No ice cores were taken at the site of the lost squandron. However, some non-scientists did use a 75 meter drill to get down to the planes. Then, the non-scientists making the false claims in the creationists magazine said "We know that 75 meters of ice accumulated in 50 years. The ice cores that actual scientists take are only 3,000 meters long, so it only took 2,000 years for them to accumulate"

Of course, this ignores the quite obvious fact that snow falls in different amount in different places---which means ice layers can be different sizes---which means you have to actually count the layers, and not just measure the the distance. The fact is, snowfall is very heavy where the planes crashed, at about 2 meters per year. This is way more than in the areas where scientists actually measure.

 

[ArtGuy]

Not every tree makes annual rings.

Perhaps, but the bristlecone pine does. This is why it's used so often to help corroborate radiometric dating.

There was actually a tree older than Methuselah, but it was felled in the 60's when the person taking the core sample accidentally broke it off inside, killing the tree. Whoops. At the time of its death, it was over 5000 years old.

It's also worth noting that since a given climate will create matching ring patterns in different trees, you can compare two different trees, even dead ones, and match them up, assuming their life spans overlapped. This method has been used to create accurate year-by-year chronologies of certain forests going back 10,000 years.

Trees don't create multiple rings per year, as cubedbee said. Which means that these ages are minimums. (Really, they're pretty darned accurate, so it's not likely that the chronologies are off by much, if at all.) So what's the deal with this? How does YEC reconcile with dendrochronology?