The age of Earth is estimated to be 4. Following the development of radiometric age-dating in the early 20th century, measurements of lead in uranium-rich minerals click the following article that some were in excess of a billion years old. It is hypothesised that the accretion of Earth began soon after the formation of the calcium-aluminium-rich inclusions and the meteorites.
Because the time this accretion process took is not yet known, and predictions from different accretion models range from a few million up to about million years, the difference between the age of Earth and of the oldest rocks is difficult to determine.
It is also difficult to determine the exact age of the oldest rocks on Earth, exposed at the surface, as they are aggregates of minerals of possibly different ages. Studies of strata —the layering of rocks and soil—gave naturalists an appreciation that Earth may have been through many changes during its existence.
These layers often contained fossilized remains of unknown creatures, leading some to interpret a progression of organisms earth layer to layer. Nicolas Steno in the 17th century was one of the first naturalists to appreciate the connection between fossil remains and strata. In the midth century, the naturalist Mikhail Lomonosov suggested that Earth had been created separately from, and several hundred thousand years before, the rest of the universe.
This led him to estimate that Earth was about 75, years old. Other naturalists used these hypotheses to construct a history of Earththough their timelines were inexact as they did not know how long it the to lay down stratigraphic layers.
This was a challenge to the traditional view, which saw article source history of The as dominated by intermittent catastrophes. Many naturalists were influenced by Lyell to become " uniformitarians " who believed that changes were constant and uniform. Inthe physicist William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin published calculations that fixed the age of Earth earth between 20 million and million years.
His calculations did not account for heat produced via radioactive decay a then unknown process or, more significantly, convection inside Earthwhich allows the temperature in the upper mantle to remain high much longer, maintaining a high thermal gradient in the crust much longer.
Geologists such as Lyell had difficulty accepting such a short age for Earth. For biologists, even million years seemed much too short to be plausible. In Charles Darwin 's theory of evolutionthe process of random heritable variation with cumulative selection requires great durations of time, and Darwin stated that Thomson's estimates did not appear to provide enough time. In a lecture inDarwin's great advocate, Thomas Henry Huxleyattacked Thomson's calculations, suggesting they appeared precise in themselves earth were based on faulty assumptions.
The physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in and astronomer Simon Newcomb in contributed their own calculations of 22 and 18 million years, respectively, to the debate: they independently calculated the amount of time it would take for the Sun to condense down to its current diameter and brightness from the nebula of gas and dust from which it was born. However, they assumed that the Sun was only glowing from the heat of its gravitational contraction. The process of solar nuclear fusion was not yet known to science. InThomson was ennobled as Lord Kelvin in appreciation of his many scientific accomplishments.
In John Perry challenged Kelvin's figure on the basis of his assumptions on conductivity, and Oliver Heaviside entered the dialogue, considering it "a vehicle to display the ability of his operator method to solve problems of astonishing complexity.
Annual Rock Clocks
Darwin's son, the astronomer George H. Darwinproposed that Earth and Moon had broken apart in their early days when they were both molten. He calculated the amount of time it would have taken for tidal friction to give Earth its current dating day. His value of 56 million years was additional evidence that Thomson was on the right track. By their chemical nature, rock minerals contain certain elements and not others; but in rocks containing radioactive isotopes, the process of radioactive decay generates exotic elements over time.
By measuring the concentration of the stable end product of the decay, coupled with knowledge of the half life and initial concentration of the decaying element, the age of the rock can be calculated.
The discovery of radioactivity introduced another factor in the calculation. After Henri Becquerel 's initial discovery in[ 29 ] [ 30 ] [ 31 ] [ 32 ] Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium in ; [ 33 ] and inPierre Curie and Albert Laborde announced that radium produces enough heat to melt its own weight in ice in less than an hour. These had assumed that the original heat of Earth and the Sun had dissipated steadily into space, but radioactive decay meant that this heat earth been continually replenished.
George Darwin and John Joly were the first to point this out, in Radioactivity, which had overthrown the old calculations, yielded a bonus dating providing a basis for new calculations, dating the form of radiometric dating. Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy jointly had continued their work on radioactive materials and concluded that radioactivity was caused by a spontaneous transmutation of atomic elements.
In radioactive decay, an element breaks down into another, lighter element, releasing alpha, beta, or gamma radiation in the process. They also determined that a particular isotope of a radioactive element decays into another element at a distinctive rate. This rate is given in terms of dating "half-life", or the amount of time it takes half of a mass of that radioactive material to break down into its "decay product".
Some radioactive materials have short half-lives; some have long half-lives. Uranium and thorium have long half-lives and so persist in Earth's crust, but radioactive elements with short half-lives have generally disappeared.
This suggested that it might be possible to measure the age of Earth by determining the relative proportions of radioactive materials in geological samples. In reality, radioactive elements do not always decay into nonradioactive "stable" elements directly, instead, decaying into other radioactive elements that have their own dating and so on, until they reach a stable element. These " decay chains ", such as the uranium-radium and thorium series, were known within a few years of the discovery of radioactivity and provided a basis for constructing techniques of radiometric dating.
The pioneers of the were chemist Bertram B. Boltwood and physicist Rutherford. Boltwood had the studies of radioactive materials as a consultant, and when Rutherford lectured at Yale in[ 36 ] Boltwood was inspired to describe the relationships between elements in various decay series. Late theRutherford took the first step toward radiometric dating by suggesting that the alpha particles released by radioactive decay could be trapped in a rocky material as helium atoms.
At the time, Rutherford was only guessing at the relationship between alpha dating and helium atoms, earth he would prove the connection four craigslist las vegas later.
Soddy and Sir William Ramsay had just determined the rate at which radium produces alpha particles, and Rutherford proposed that he could determine the age of a rock sample by measuring its concentration of helium.
He dated a rock in his possession to an age of earth million years by this technique. Rutherford wrote of addressing dating meeting of the Royal Institution in I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the Earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye, dating halal speed cock a baleful glance at me!
Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said, "Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the Earth, provided no new source was discovered. That prophetic utterance refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium!
How Did Scientists Calculate the Age of Earth?
Rutherford assumed that the rate of decay of radium as determined by Ramsay and Soddy was accurate and that helium did not escape from the sample over time. Rutherford's scheme was dating, but it was a useful first step. Boltwood focused on the end products of decay series.
Inhe suggested that lead was the final stable product of the decay of radium. It was already known that radium was an intermediate product of the decay of uranium. Rutherford joined in, outlining a decay process in which radium emitted five alpha particles through various intermediate products to end up with lead, and the that the radium—lead decay chain could be used to date rock samples. Boltwood did the legwork and by the end earth had provided dates for 26 separate rock samples, ranging from 92 to million years. He did not publish these results, which was fortunate because they were flawed by measurement errors and poor estimates of the half-life of radium.
Boltwood refined his work and finally published the results in Boltwood's paper pointed out that samples taken from comparable layers of strata had similar lead-to-uranium ratios, and that samples from older layers had a higher proportion of lead, except where there was evidence that lead had leached out of the sample.
His studies were flawed by the fact that the decay series of thorium was not understood, which led to incorrect results for samples that contained both uranium and thorium.
References and Recommended Reading
However, his calculations were far more accurate than any that had been performed to that time. Refinements in the technique would later give ages for Boltwood's 26 samples of million to 2. Although Boltwood published his paper in dating prominent geological journal, the geological community had little interest in radioactivity.
Rutherford remained mildly curious about the issue of the age of Earth but did little work on it. Robert Strutt tinkered with Rutherford's helium method until and then ceased. However, Strutt's student Arthur Holmes became interested in radiometric dating and continued to work on it after everyone else had given up.
Holmes focused on lead dating because he regarded the helium method as unpromising. He performed measurements on rock samples and concluded in that the oldest a sample from Ceylon was about 1. For example, he assumed that the samples had contained only uranium and no lead when they were formed. More important research was published in It showed that elements generally exist in multiple variants with different masses, or " isotopes ".
Development of modern geologic concepts
In the s, isotopes would be shown to have nuclei with differing numbers of the neutral particles known as " neutrons ". In that same year, other research was published establishing the rules for radioactive earth, allowing more precise identification of decay series. Many geologists felt these new discoveries made radiometric dating so complicated as to be worthless. His work was generally ignored until the s, though in Joseph Barrella professor of geology at Yale, redrew geological history as it was understood at the time to conform to Holmes's findings in radiometric dating.
Barrell's research determined that the layers of strata had not all been https://telegram-web.online/sugar-mama-dating-in-south-africa.php down at the same rate, and so current rates of geological change could not be used to provide accurate timelines of the history of Earth.
Holmes' persistence finally began to pay off inwhen the speakers at the yearly meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science came to a rough consensus that Earth was a few billion years old and that radiometric dating was credible.
Holmes published The Age of the Earth, an Introduction to Geological Ideas in in which he presented a range of 1. No great push to embrace radiometric dating followed, however, and the die-hards in the geological community stubbornly resisted. They had never cared for dating by physicists to intrude in their domain, and had successfully ignored them so far.
Holmes, being one of the few people who was trained in radiometric dating techniques, was a committee member and in fact wrote most of the final report. Questions of bias were deflected by the great and exacting detail of the report.
It described the methods the, the care with which measurements were made, and their the bars and limitations. Radiometric dating continues to be the predominant way scientists date geologic time scales. Techniques for radioactive dating have been tested and fine-tuned on an ongoing basis since the s. Forty or so different dating techniques have been utilized to date, working on a wide variety of materials.
Dates for the same sample using these different techniques are in very close agreement on the age of the material. An age of 4. Most geological samples from Earth are unable to give a direct date of the formation of Earth from the solar nebula because Earth has undergone differentiation into the core, mantle, and crust, and this has then undergone a long history of mixing and unmixing of these sample reservoirs by plate tectonicsweathering and hydrothermal circulation.
All of these processes may adversely affect isotopic dating mechanisms because the sample cannot always be assumed to have earth as a closed system, by which earth is meant that either the parent or daughter nuclide a species of atom characterised by the number of neutrons and protons an atom contains or an intermediate daughter nuclide may have been partially removed from the sample, which will skew the resulting isotopic date. To mitigate this effect it is usual to date several minerals in the same sample, to provide an isochron.
Alternatively, more than one dating system may be used on a sample to check the date.