Ancient trees recorded in mines

w1z4rd

w1z4rd

Karmic Sangoma
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Spectacular fossil forests have been found in the coal mines of Illinois by a US-UK team of researchers.
The group reported one discovery last year, but has since identified a further five examples.
The ancient vegetation - now turned to rock - is visible in the ceilings of mines covering thousands of hectares.
These were among the first forests to evolve on the planet, Dr Howard Falcon-Lang told the British Association Science Festival in Liverpool.
"These are the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time," he told reporters.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7604721.stm

Pretty interesting find.. for those of us who know the world is over 6000 years old.
 
Carbon dating has been found to be.... um incorrect at times. They carbon dated a known artifact (the people doing the dating didn't know that) and it was out by some ridiculous amount of time.
 
remybfg10k said:
So w1z4rd, you believe in this "carbon dating" theory then? :p
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Pff.. this new fangled carbon dating is wrong, because you find carbon in pencils, and they never go on dates! So therefore science is wrong about everything. :p
 
froot said:
Carbon dating has been found to be.... um incorrect at times. They carbon dated a known artifact (the people doing the dating didn't know that) and it was out by some ridiculous amount of time.
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Could you show us links to that? I know the technology has being improved a lot with more reliable decay rates and stuff.. so I would be interesting to see where they got it wrong recently. I know it can be out from a handful of years, but not a big number. At least not in modern science where they normally measure several element isotopes.
 
remybfg10k said:
http://www.innoval.com/C14/
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And the real story...

Various tests have been performed on the shroud, yet the debates about its origin continue. Radiocarbon dating in 1988 by three independent teams of scientists yielded results published in Nature indicating that the shroud was made during the Middle Ages, approximately 1300 years after Jesus lived.[3] Claims of bias and error in the testing were raised almost immediately, and were answered by Harry E. Gove [4] or others. Yet the dating controversy has continued. Follow-up analysis published in 2005, for example, claimed that the sample dated by the teams was taken from an area of the shroud that was not a part of the original cloth. The shroud was also damaged by a fire in the Late Middle Ages which could have added carbon material to the cloth, resulting in a higher radiocarbon content and a later calculated age. This analysis itself is questioned by skeptics such as Joe Nickell, who reason that the conclusions of the author, Raymond Rogers, result from "starting with the desired conclusion and working backward to the evidence".[5] Former Nature editor Philip Ball has said that the idea that Rogers steered his study to a preconceived conclusion is "unfair" and Rogers "has a history of respectable work".
However, the 2008 research at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit may revise the 1260–1390 dating toward which it originally contributed, leading its director Christopher Ramsey to call the scientific community to probe anew the authenticity of the Shroud.[6][7] "With the radiocarbon measurements and with all of the other evidence which we have about the Shroud, there does seem to be a conflict in the interpretation of the different evidence" Christopher Ramsey said to BBC News in 2008, after the new research emerged.[8] Despite keeping an open mind, Ramsey has stressed that he would be surprised if the 1988 tests were shown to be far off, let alone "a thousand years wrong."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_14_dating_of_the_Turin_Shroud

A little more

In 1988, the Holy See agreed to permit six centers to independently perform radiocarbon dating on portions of a swatch taken from a corner of the shroud, but at the last minute they changed their minds and permitted only three research centers to undertake such analysis. The chosen laboratories at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, produced consistent results indicating that the analysed portion of the shroud dated from the 13th to 14th centuries (1260–1390).[3] The scientific community had asked the Holy See to authorize more samples, including from the image-bearing part of the shroud, but this request was refused. One possible account for the reluctance is that if the image is genuine, the destruction of parts of it for purposes of dating could be considered sacrilege.
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Rule of thumb, double check any religious ( I say religious because the article spoken about here is of a religious nature, and therefore will have apologetics) claims of failed or incorrect science.
 
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i love these sorts of things but as i am at work i cannot read through the link so i will do it at home.
 
froot said:
Carbon dating has been found to be.... um incorrect at times. They carbon dated a known artifact (the people doing the dating didn't know that) and it was out by some ridiculous amount of time.
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linky
if you tell me which "artifact" it was I'll get you the relevant link.
 
w1z i c&p'd the first google link that came up so that merc and froot could go fight it out somewhere else
 
remybfg10k said:
w1z i c&p'd the first google link that came up so that merc and froot could go fight it out somewhere else
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Sorry :p I just responded to that link :P I assumed it was the one froot was mentioning, but until we get more information from the frootsta... we will just have to wait :P
 
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