Today we’re going to point our skeptical eye at one of the key players in the debate between geologists and Young Earthers over the age of the Earth. In June of 1992, Dr. Steven Austin took a sample of dacite from the new lava dome inside Mount St. Helens, the volcano in Washington state. The dacite sample was known to have been formed from a 1986 magma flow, and so its actual age was an established fact. Dr. Austin submitted the sample for radiometric dating to an independent laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The results came back dating the rock to 350,000 years old, with certain compounds within it as old as 2.8 million years. Dr. Austin’s conclusion is that radiometric dating is uselessly unreliable. Critics found that Dr. Austin chose a dating technique that is inappropriate for the sample tested, and charged that he deliberately used the wrong experiment in order to promote the idea that science fails to show that the Earth is older than the Bible claims. Yet the experiment remains as one of the cornerstones of the Young Earth movement.
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4146