I just finished reading about volcanic material here in the Pacific Northwest that is radiometrically dated at about 5 million years. So please help me with this. Based on the discussions in this forum that say that 100 years and 5 million years is well within–I don’t know how you might want me to say it–well, only about a .01% discrepancy over the period of a 4.5 billion year old earth, not worth quibbling about. (But comparing 100 to 5,000,000, it is off by a factor of 50,000.)
So help me here. When I read that this lava flow is about 5 million years old, what am I to think of that date? Obviously, we don’t have any eyewitness accounts for these eruptions and flows that I am aware of, so it has to be more than 3,000 years ago. But since 100 years can read as 5.5 million, then the date could be anywhere between 3,000 years or 10 million years?
What I am learning from this forum is that there is no way, from a deep time perspective, to validate radiometric dating using rocks of known age.
So although in the samples from Novarupta, there is 5.5 million years of the daughter product measured, from your perspective, the assumptions behind radiometric dating are correct even though there is no valid way to corroborate this.