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Holmes published The Age of the Earth, an Introduction to Geological Ideas in 1927 in which he presented a range of 1.6 to 3.0 billion years. No great push to embrace radiometric dating followed, however, and the die-hards in the geological community stubbornly resisted.
The use of radiometric dating was first published in 1907 by Bertram Boltwood [2] and is now the principal source of information about the absolute age of rocks and other geological features, including the age of fossilized life forms or the age of Earth itself, and can also be used to date a wide range of natural and man-made materials.
Uranium–lead dating. Uranium–lead dating, abbreviated U–Pb dating, is one of the oldest [1] and most refined of the radiometric dating schemes. It can be used to date rocks that formed and crystallised from about 1 million years to over 4.5 billion years ago with routine precisions in the 0.1–1 percent range. [2] [3]
The geologic time scale is a way of representing deep time based on events that have occurred throughout Earth's history, a time span of about 4.54 ± 0.05 Ga (4.54 billion years). [5] It chronologically organises strata, and subsequently time, by observing fundamental changes in stratigraphy that correspond to major geological or ...
Exposure dating uses the concentration of exotic nuclides (e.g. 10 Be, 26 Al, 36 Cl) produced by cosmic rays interacting with Earth materials as a proxy for the age at which a surface, such as an alluvial fan, was created. Burial dating uses the differential radioactive decay of 2 cosmogenic elements as a proxy for the age at which a sediment ...
The current estimate of the age of the Earth is ca. 4500 million years. The solution of the dating problem arrived only with the discovery that some natural elements undergo a continuous decay. This led to the first radiometric datings by Boltwood [2] and Strutt. [3]
He got results of ages of 400 to 2200 million years, the first successful use of radioactive decay by Pb/U chemical dating. More recently, older mineral deposits have been dated to about 4.4 billion years old, close to the best estimate of the age of Earth .
Other radiometric dating techniques are available for earlier periods. One of the most widely used is potassium–argon dating (K–Ar dating). Potassium-40 is a radioactive isotope of potassium that decays into argon-40. The half-life of potassium-40 is 1.3 billion years, far longer than that of carbon-14, allowing much older samples to be dated.