Redate the Grand Canyon AGAIN

Just a month after a new study from the University of New Mexico claimed the Grand Canyon was 17 million years old, not 6 million, a new study wants to more than triple THAT estimate, to at least 55 million years old, if not a pre-KT dinosaur extinction date of 65 million years ago:

The ancient sandstone in the canyon walls contains a mineral called apatite, hosting minute amounts of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. These slowly decay, or disintegrate, Rebecca Flowers, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said. An abundance of the two elements [fixed from an earlier “three”], paired with temperature information from Earth’s interior, offered a sort of clock to calculate when the apatite grains were embedded in rock a mile deep—the canyon’s approximate depth today — and when they cooled as they neared the surface as a result of erosion.

Apatite from the bottom of the canyon’s Upper Granite Gorge region yields similar dates as samples collected on the nearby plateau, said geologist Brian Wernicke of the California Institute of Technology, a collaborator in the research.

Very interesting story. Kudos to WorldScience for quickly correcting the “three” mistake in the original version of this.

The one thing that worries me is the young-earth creationist types are immediately going to start claiming, “See, this proves radiometric dating doesn’t work.”