By measuring radioactive elements in rocks from Earth and other parts of the solar system, scientists can develop a timeline of our planet's early years.
Earth is roughly 4.54 billion years old. In that time, it has seen continents form and disappear, ice caps expand and retreat, and life evolve from single-celled organisms into blue whales."When you're an Earth scientist who looks at a rock, it's not just a rock; it's like that rock has a story that you can try to decipher," said Becky Flowers , a geologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Take radioactive uranium-238, a common form of uranium. Its atoms will release energy until they eventually turn into lead. That process occurs at a fixed rate known as a half-life, which corresponds to the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms to decay. The half-life of uranium-238 is more than 4 billion years, meaning it takes more than 4 billion years for half of the uranium-238 in a sample to become lead. This makes it perfect for dating objects that are very, very old.
Using these methods, geologists have found minerals on Earth that date as far back as 4.4 billion years, meaning the planet has been around at least that long. But if scientists say Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old, where did those extra 100 million years or so come from? But scientists can use radiometric dating to determine the age of rocks from other parts of the solar system, too. Some meteorites contain materials that are more than 4.56 billion years old , and rocks from the moon and Mars have also been dated to around 4.5 billion years ago.
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