solar activity, a coronal mass ejection. EFFECTS AND DURATION OF ENHANCED LUMINOSITY During the Ice Age, the climate was quite different. The oceans were warmer and evaporating much more water (Oard 1986), so there was more rain, snow, and cloudy weather (Vardiman 2013). Clouds are very efficient in reflecting light, as are glacial ice and volcanic dust, so the earth’s albedo (percentage of sunlight reflected back into space) must have been greater than the 30% it now is (Goode et al. 2001). Having the Sun be more luminous would have been compensated for by the greater albedo, leaving the average temperature of the earth roughly the same, which apparently was what God intended. In the Ice Age, the weather oscillated between sunny/warm and cloudy/cool/rainy many times during the year (Oard 2021b). The brighter sunlight, plus warmth and wet ground, would have accelerated tree growth in the first phase of a sunny period. A dry spell in the last phase would slow growth. The two phases would produce a tree ring (Lammerts 1983), which the following cloudy and cool period of little growth would accentuate. The 14,000-ring history that dendrochronologists have put together from living and dead trees (Van der Plecht et al. 2020) indicates that the weather oscillations stimulated an average of about nine additional rings per year during the first thousand years after the flood, about one ring every five weeks. The Sun’s contribution to this God-designed period of extraordinary plant growth would have come to an end when its luminosity diminished to the normal level, presumably near the end of the Ice Age. Could the Sun have cooled naturally, during the full-convection period, enough to have restored it to its present condition? It looks like the answer is “no.” If we divide the amount of heat in the Sun by its present luminosity, we get the rate of decrease in the average temperature (several million Kelvin) as about 300 Kelvin per millennium. That is not enough. I suggest that God cooled the Sun by the same means He used to remove the excess radiogenic heat in the earth during the year of the flood, and possibly afterward (Humphreys 2018). But we have no data indicating how fast heat was removed, so I do not know the time scale for the burst of high-energy particles from the Sun. We can only say from the 14C record that the burst was largely over with by about 1500 B.C. CONCLUSION: EFFECTS ON CARBON 14 DATING Fig. 9 shows the quantities we need to understand how the step of 14C produced by the Sun’s energetic particle burst affected carbon 14 dating. (Note that some of the particles from the Sun were probably nuclei heavier than protons, which might be important for other types of dating.) For mathematical simplicity, let us assume the 14C/C ratio in the air, A(t), the blue curve in Fig. 9, rose exponentially: (7) Here A(p) is the ratio in the air at present, p is the present date, t is the real date when a creature died, f is the date of the flood, (about 2500 B.C. by the no-gap Hebrew chronology), and α is the rate constant of the exponential. To match historical dates, an α of 1/1000 years seems about right for now, but it needs to be examined in more detail. Eq. (7) ignores the initial ratio of about 0.5% mentioned in the (7) introduction, and it takes no account of the cosmic rays from nearby stars. The ratio in the specimen at the present is: (8) where λ is the decay constant for 14C, 1/8267 years (half-life is 5730 years). Turn this equation around and solve it numerically to get the t, the real date of death, corresponding to a given value of C(p) observed in a specimen today. Now let us look at how the uniformitarian date, T, of a creature’s death is calculated. The conventionally used calibration curve B(t), the dashed green line in Fig. 9, gives the amount of 14C/C we would need to have in the air to get T to agree with the uniformitarian treering chronology, which assumes only one tree ring formed every year. B(t) differs from the horizontal black dashed line, today’s ratio, by an amount called δ14C/C. I am ignoring all the fluctuations in B(t) and simply approximating it as an exponential with a small rate constant β. To match the uniformitarian calibration curve, a β of about 1/70,000 years works well. Writing B in terms of T gives us: Using (9) to express B(T), C(p) is related to T by an exponential decay with rate constant λ, shown by the dashed red curve in Fig. 9: Equating the right-hand sides of eqs. (8) and (10) gives us a relation between t and x = t - T, the excess age of the uniformitarian date: Notice that when t approaches f, the excess age x becomes large. For example, a tree that died a hundred years after the flood would give an excess age of about 17,400 years. So, ignoring the large step in 14C/C that occurred in the Ice Age, plus assuming only one tree ring per year, results in large errors in radiocarbon ages. Figure 9. Quantities related to carbon 14 dating. (8) (10) (9) (11) HUMPHREYS Cause of large post-Flood jump in 14C 2023 ICC 285
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=