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In 1862, the physicist William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin published calculations that fixed the age of Earth at between 20 million and 400 million years. [19] [20] He assumed that Earth had formed as a completely molten object, and determined the amount of time it would take for the near-surface temperature gradient to decrease to its present value.
In physical cosmology, the age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang: 13.8 billion years. [1] Astronomers have two different approaches to determine the age of the universe . One is based on a particle physics model of the early universe called Lambda-CDM , matched to measurements of the distant, and thus old features, like the ...
For example, 201.4 ± 0.2 Ma, the lower boundary of the Jurassic Period, is defined as 201,400,000 years old with an uncertainty of 200,000 years. Other SI prefix units commonly used by geologists are Ga (gigaannum, billion years), and ka (kiloannum, thousand years), with the latter often represented in calibrated units (before present).
So to understand how we came to exist on planet Earth, we'll need to know how Earth managed to stay fit for life for billions of years. Earth has been habitable for billions of years ...
For example, the age of the Amitsoq gneisses from western Greenland was determined to be 3.60 ± 0.05 Ga (billion years ago) using uranium–lead dating and 3.56 ± 0.10 Ga (billion years ago) using lead–lead dating, results that are consistent with each other. [11]: 142–143
A graphical view of the Cosmic Calendar, featuring the months of the year, days of December, the final minute, and the final second. The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the chronology of the universe, scaling its currently understood age of 13.8 billion years to a single year in order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in science education or popular science.
Solar luminosity was 30% dimmer when the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, [14] and it is expected to increase in luminosity approximately 10% per billion years in the future. [15] On very long time scales, the evolution of the sun is also an important factor in determining Earth's climate.
For example, techniques based on isotopes with half-lives in the thousands of years, such as carbon-14, cannot be used to date materials that have ages on the order of billions of years, as the detectable amounts of the radioactive atoms and their decayed daughter isotopes will be too small to measure within the uncertainty of the instruments.