Aristotle thought the earth had existed eternally. Roman poet Lucretius, intellectual heir to the Greek atomists, believed its formation must have been relatively recent, given that there were no records going back beyond the Trojan War. The Talmudic rabbis, Martin Luther and others used the biblical account to extrapolate back from known history and came up with rather similar estimates for when the earth came into being. Within decades observation began overtaking such thinking. In the s Nicolas Steno formulated our modern concepts of deposition of horizontal strata. He inferred that where the layers are not horizontal, they must have been tilted since their deposition and noted that different strata contain different kinds of fossil.

Radiometric Dating



Radiometric After all, a rock can't tell - Best free essay
Geological time scale — 4. Geological maps. Absolute age dating deals with assigning actual dates in years before the present to geological events. Contrast this with relative age dating, which instead is concerned with determining the orders of events in Earth's past. Scholars and naturalists, understandably, have long been interested in knowing the absolute age of the Earth, as well as other important geological events.


Exploration and investigation works
What was missing from the early geologic time scale? While the order of events was given, the dates at which the events happened were not. With the discovery of radioactivity in the late s, scientists were able to measure the absolute age , or the exact age of some rocks in years. Absolute dating allows scientists to assign numbers to the breaks in the geologic time scale. Radiometric dating and other forms of absolute age dating allowed scientists to get an absolute age from a rock or fossil.




Geologists count back more than 4 billion years to the oldest Earth materials. Have you ever tried to count to a million? Counting once per second easy at the start, but tough when you reach the hundred-thousand mark , 24 hours per day, seven days per week no weekends off , it would take you 11 days, 14 hours to count to one million! There are a thousand millions in a billion, so counting to a billion would take you approximately 32 years. Taking this one step further, it is not humanly possible to count to 4.