Carbon 14 dating is often dismissed as relying on the assumption the C14/C12 ratio in the past has been comparable to the present, however what is rarely acknowledged is this assumption can be checked.
The way the assumption is checked is by finding a system which admits dating independent of C14. Popular choices are dendrochronology, where tree-rings are counted and by matching variation in tree-ring width across trees it is possible to build a chronology stretching back 12000 years, or varvas, where yearly variations in sediment deposits in lakes admit chronologies to be build stretching back tens of thousands of years. By C-14 dating either the tree in a tree-ring chronology, or microfossils of plant remains in a varva chronology it is then possible to check if the C14-date match the estimated calendar date.
I was curious how close this match was and what the actual data looked like. I therefore went to http://intcal.qub.ac.uk/intcal13/ and downloaded the full intcal13 dataset which i have plotted in the figure below. Each point represents a specific sample which is dated using an external method (the x-axis) and by C14 (y-axis), and the different colors represents 23 different datasets roughly corresponding to multiple dendrochronological datasets from multiple regions and involving multiple tree species, the famous lake Suigetsu varva chronology (the green dots from dataset 9 which appear almost like a solid line!), various coral chronologies and chronologies from speleothems (cave stones).
If the WT interpretation of genesis is true, all C14 dates must refer to ages less than 6000 years, and properly less than 5300 years reflecting noahs ark. The question is now why all these systems agree with the C14 date; the only explanation is they, though being composed of vastly different processes, for some reason experienced an explosive growth at just the same rate as C14 was being created in the atmosphere, however why all these systems should behave the same way is clearly a mystery.
Here is a close-up for the past 10000 years. Can anyone spot the effect of noahs ark?
