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Creation Day 3: God creates the "chemical" breath of life
God's step-by-step 'timed process ' in creating plants on Earth .
The aging process in human beings is easy to see. As we age, our hair turns gray, our skin wrinkles and our gait slows. Life span is defined as the average number of years an individual is expected to live from birth. God has set man's life span at 120 years. ~ Genesis 6:3
However, rocks and other objects in nature do not display such obvious clues about how long they have been around. So, how can scientists accurately determine the exact age of a rock? Here are two examples.
About 100 miles from the Hawaii's c oast al resorts, Kīlauea V olcano sits on a “hot spot . ” Hot spots are holes in the Earth's crust where mantle magma rises to the Earth's surface and forms volcanoes . The newly formed 'hot' basaltic rock pictured on the left ( from the Kilauea's Volcano ) is only 1 day old. Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin–Madison have recently confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth. The big question now is - what method d id these scientists
use in determin ing the exact age of this rock to be 3.5 billion year old? The answer is radioactive dating. Radioactive dating , or radiometric dating as it is sometimes called, is a method used by scientists to date rocks and other objects based on the known decay rate of radioactive isotopes. Here is an easy example of how it works.
When you think of radioactive decay , picture popcorn kernels cooking on a stove at a set temperature. You cannot predict when a given kernel will pop, or which kernels will pop first before other kernels. But after taking repeated measurements, you can then predict that - after 1 minute, 10% of the kernels will have popped; after 3 minutes, 50% of the kernels will have popped, and after 5 minutes 100% of the kernels will have popped.
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