Still at it I see, CTD.
Geologists mean the same thing as everyone else when they employ the term kinematic.
Actually, they were very much talking about elements moving along cracks, only on a different scale.
Equivocating now? Yes, they were talking on the scale of the rocks moving as a whole and as they moved, cracking and carrying the cracks with them. In either case they referred to post-kinematic as the period after the rocks had stopped moving. Curiously the people in the sciences get to determine how to use the terminology used in the science.
For those playing along at home, you will recall that radiohalos cannot even form until there's solid rock.
And then at any time after the rock has solidified. Of interest here is that the rocks have not only solidified, but that they have cooled, cracked, moved and cracked some more, and that after this has occurred the rocks are free to be inundated with radon gas and radon carrying water, along with minerals that then can refill the cracks. See
Post 39962 again:
There's more. This article,
POLONIUM HALOS AND MYRMEKITE IN PEGMATITE AND GRANITE, by Lorence G. Collins, where he talks about some "Odd Circumstantial Facts":
[quote]When I looked closely into Gentry's Po halo studies, I noted four odd circumstantial facts contrary to his hypothesis.
The first oddity is that his Po halos all occurred in granites and granite pegmatites, never in any other rock types, excepting locally near Bancroft.
In that area, the uranium-bearing calcite veins cross-cut the granitic rocks, and Po halos are absent from mafic rocks whether the mafic rocks are older or younger in age than the granites. This is true even when biotite is relatively abundant among the mafic minerals. These Po-halo-free rocks include biotite-bearing gabbros, diorites, and tonalites, as well as their volcanic equivalents. On the basis of field, chemical, and microscopic textural relationships, all of these mafic rocks are crystallized from magmas at high temperatures.
It is odd that Po halos are found only in certain, supposedly primordial, biotite-bearing granites and not in all primordial, biotite-bearing rocks. The Creator was evidently very selective about where he tucked the short-lived Po!
A second oddity I discovered was that
all of the granites in which Gentry found Po halos also contain myrmekite. Myrmekite is a replacement mineral intergrowth, a fact that suggests that Po halos may not be present in all granites but only in granites formed by replacement processes. Conversely, perhaps only granites containing myrmekite should exhibit Po halos. In reality these do not always contain Po halos. Again, the Creator was very selective.
In other words, Polonium halos only occurred when the rocks in question were infected with uranium, saturated with radon and had mineral replacement happening along cracks, crevises and fissures, mineral replacement that is not restricted from carrying radon along with it.
In other words, the Polonium halos only occur in rocks where this infusion of radon gas can occur.
I've been researching a little more, and I've found out that I was mistaken to focus on the formation of tubes around the migration paths.
To be sure, they'd form. There's no way around it.
There would be decay along the paths, but you have some logical issues with this decay forming tunnels. Consider when a particle decays: it fires off an alpha particle at a random angle in 3D space, and NOT perpendicular to the fissure. The probability of the particle being fired on a perpendicular path is very small, most will be fired ahead or behind and the distance from the crack will be random. Result: no (visible) tunnel.
Conversely any small void or slightly larger space would contain more of the radon carrying water, and thus have increased probability of decay occurring from the same relative position, thus resulting in halos along the fissures, cracks, and crevices -- as observed.
But I looked into alpha-recoil tracks and found that they're much more devastating. When alpha decay occurs, the nucleus of the decaying atom recoils in the opposite direction. If it occurs in rocks, this creates clear tracks even if the atom was part of a solution.
And this is another red herring.
How impressive! Thanks for condescending to disclose the logarithmic nature of the graph. I wish that all facts could be pried loose in so few posts. But at any rate, I shan't have to demonstrate this one in the face of unrelenting obfuscation.
Sorry CTD, but I can't anticipate what it is that you don't know. You comment as if you know what you are talking about, CTD, yet you demonstrate time and again, not just here on the graph and your "tunnel" formation and in your "quarter"-life calculations, but several other places, that there are things that you just do not understand. We don't know what they are until you make these bogus comments rather than ask for explanation.
That you do not have the math or the science background to enable you to understand these things is not your fault, and lack of understand thus is not "bad", but what I find disturbing is that you seem to prefer pretending not only to understand but that you have some knowledge and authority to comment instead of asking for clarification.
The fact remains: change the decay rate, and you change the alpha particle energy, and this changes the radius of the halo. Uranium halos show no variation in ring size, therefore there was no change in alpha particle energy while they were formed, and as they took several hundred millions of years to form, the earth is old.
I think it's time to conclude my participation in the radiohalo discussion - for now at least.
Thanks CTD.
Enjoy.
