Oldest diamond, thanks for the link.

http://www.excellentdiamonds.com/oldest_diamond.htm

Creationism is not based on facts, but on beliefs

Scientists have unearthed diamonds more than 4 billion years old and trapped inside crystals of zircon in the Jack Hills region in Western Australia.

Read more about it at http://www.excellentdiamonds.com/oldest_diamond.htm

http://books.google.com/books?id=pRWqfsVTAY8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#PPA15,M1

I regret to say that I have not seen the original RATE poster session that presents the diamond claims because they appear not to be available anywhere on the web.

See http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/research/AGUC-14_Poster_Baumgardner.pdf.

Linked to from http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=research&action=index&page=researchp_aguconference, where you will find links to the other posters.

As anyone who watched “Superman” could have told you, diamonds are created when enormously powerful beings crush coal in their hands.

Clearly, diamonds are from the preNoachian era of giants.

No wonder the only thing scientists date is carbon!

Re: diamond specifically is an area of great interest for me that I have worked on for ~40 years although not with concern for age dating particularly. If memory serves me, Chuck Naser at the CIWGL was one of the first to develop a technique for direct age dating of individual diamonds based on isotopes (but not carbon isotopes). It’s about 15 years since I was interested in that so my recollection is not very good.

In general since the phase equilibria of diamond requires very high pressures, we tend to assume that diamonds at the earth’s surface are older than the host rocks which contain them, e.g. kimberlites and lamproites. Since the host rocks are much easier to age date by different isotopic methods it is generally concluded that the diamonds they contain which are either xenocrysts in the overall matrix, or phenocrysts within other xenocrysts of peridotitic or eclogitic composition, that the diamonds are older than the host rocks. Note I say host, not source rocks. Therefore, since virtually none of these host rocks has been dated at less than ~60 my bp, and since all the experimental evidence (which is vast) indicates that natural diamond is only formed at pressures exceeding 35,000 atmospheres, this blows a huge hole in the RATE claim.

As usual, the complexities of real science are completely ignored by the creationists.

I regret to say that I have not seen the original RATE poster session that presents the diamond claims because they appear not to be available anywhere on the web. This is unsurprising in as much as poster sessions are not peer reviewed or reviewed at all for that matter except by critics on hand when they are presented. That alone is telling.

Further to all of the above, there is also the fact that a) natural diamond contains measureable amounts of nitrogen which under neutron radiation can be transmuted to 14C, and b) that it is possible and has been for the last ten years to manufacture synthetic diamonds which could very easily contain 14C in significant quantity. However, it is also unambiguously possible to identify such diamonds as synthetic, so the question arises, did the RATE study offer any of their samples to anyone else to “confirm” their interpretation?

Somehow, I am skeptical…

Regards,