Polonium Halos

The term “polonium halo” refers to a ring of damaged material where the emitted particles from a piece of radioactive material has basically messed up the surrounding rock. Since the size of the ring is related to the energy of the radiation it should be possible to determine what the radioactive material was that formed a given ring. Gentry looked at polonium halos in granite and concluded that since it takes millions of years for present day decay rates to form a “halo” and because Polonium isotopes have really short half lives (Po218 = 3.05 minutes, Po214 = >200 microseconds, Po210 = 140 days) that this was evidence for an increased rate of radioactive decay.

The problems that strike me are that there’s no mechanism for increased radioactive decay proposed, there’s no mechanism for getting rid of the huge amount of heat that would result from all that radioactive decay happening so quickly, and there’s no mechanism for dealing with the lethal amounts of radiation this would have produced. Finally, there’s a very plausible alternative that avoids all of these problems – Polonium halos are invariably found near uranium halos which makes sense since the isotopes we’re talking about here are all part of the decay series of various isotopes of Uranium.

The immediate precursor in this decay series is Radon, a gas that is quite soluble in water and easily diffuses through small fractures in rock. A steady amount of Uranium decay will produce a steady stream of radon which will steadily decay into polonium which will steadily emit particles as it is formed and quickly decays. I’m no geologist, but that seems like a pretty straigtforward explanation that works a lot better than proposing an unknown decay rate increase mechanism ostensibly offset by some unknown force to remove the huge amounts of heat and radioactivity it would produce.
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/revised8.htm

When you look at Gentry’s halos you can see numerous rings showing clear sings of Radon and Polonium decay entirely consistent with Radon decaying into Polonium and creating rings along the way.

I’ve seen this argument handled by geologists before, a good discussion of it can be found here:

http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&m=162875

With some particularly pertinent posts on evidence for Radon here:

http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?act…6261&mpp=15&p=8