This seasonal discovery is new, but it's exactly the sort of thing RATE has been talking about. The main point of the RATE project is to discredit the radioisotope dating methods. Sometimes they just send samples from the same rock formation to different labs and get different results. But they also spend a lot of time finding reasons that radioisotope decay rates might change over time.
This is all from what I remember from a conversation I had with someone involved with the project about 10 years ago. They got a lot of funding and a lot of interest back in the late 90's when they were just starting. I thought some of their research was interesting, but there was so much propaganda mixed in that it turned my stomach, so I stopped following it.
The creationist pseudoscience tries to demonstrate that radioactive decay is variable here on Earth.
This seems to be another case where our standard laws of physics break down at massively high temperatures and pressures.
And of course, radioactive dating is one tool among many. The distribution of soil and rock on the Earth is almost certainly the result of billions of years of erosion, earth shifts, and climate changes.
Also: say that radioactive dating turns out to be worthless (which is not the case, even if the results in the linked article are true), that still wouldn’t tell you anything about the age of the earth. You can’t then just privilege the hypothesis that the earth is 6,000 years old.
It’s quite funny actually, if we didn’t have radioactive dating it would make a lot of sense to say that evolution itself is one of the best pieces of evidence for an old earth. It is supported by so much evidence independent of any dating methods that any discovery which changes how much we believe we can trust radioactive dating is practically meaningless. (The obvious exception are results which would indicate that earth is orders of magnitude younger than radioactive dating makes it seem to be. But, no surprise, this is not that.)
