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Well - I know you're just citing these two things as examples of things that COULD have occured, but to address them specifically (which is not to say that OTHER things couldn't affect the dating process...):

- Scientists, somehow (I've never really researched it), have determined (with a certain accepted margin of error) the state of the ozone layer in the past. In all honesty, though, the ozone layer is only one small part of our atmosphere and not the primary source for the shielding of proton radiation. If it has grown or shrunk in the past is a given - it's affect on the formation of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere is probably less of a "known quantity" but there are much greater minds than mine sorting that one out, I'm sure.

- Geologists have a very solid knowledge of the state of the Earth's tectonic plates a million years ago. There is only so much mass that comprises our planet - and for the entire surface of the planet to be raised 6 miles would be a huge increase in the requisite mass that would certainly have been determined by the scientists who study this.

If I were looking for things that would skew Carbon dating, I would look for events such as asteroid collisions, nearby volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc that are "statistical long shots" and could have contaminated samples thousands/tens of thousands of years ago and not be known by our scientists.

Who knows - something like that could have happened to create such an ancient reading on this particular fossil.

Well, when we're discussing ancient atmospheres and their compositions, remember that we can get actual samples of those atmospheres so we can know exactly what the composition was. We do that via ice cores from places like Antarctica and Greenland. Every time snow falls, it traps small bubbles of air in between the flakes. These bubbles are preserved in the pack as it is compressed down into ice by further layers on top of it. So, if we drill down to ice that was laid down 500,000 years ago, say, we can extract real atmosphere from the time from the centers of those cores. So, that's one way we can know how much changes the atmosphere has gone through over time.

-Arlos

Aye excellent point Arlos.

Langston I was not impliing the diameter of the earth was greater or not but the pressure and nature of the atmosphere (oxegyn, nitrogen, co, etc), the very make-up could have been significantly different.

Arlos gets the cookie on that one (not that you need more cookies langston)

ClakarEQ wrote:Aye excellent point Arlos.

Langston I was not impliing the diameter of the earth was greater or not but the pressure and nature of the atmosphere (oxegyn, nitrogen, co, etc), the very make-up could have been significantly different.

Arlos gets the cookie on that one (not that you need more cookies langston)

Yeah - that was a very good point Arlos. And for sure, I don't need any more cookies... I'm trying to get back to my old state of fitness and cookies just aren't allowed.