Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
age of the Earth. Since rocks almost certainly contained at least traces of original
lead, Holmes regarded this as the maximum possible age of the Earth. Based on
his review of the most suitable samples for age dating, he concluded that “no more
definite statement can therefore be made at present than that the age of the earth
exceeds 1460 million years, is probably not less than 1600 million years, and is
probably much less than 3000 million years.”
23
By 1931 a new generation of scientists, most of them chemists and physicists
with no allegiance to geology or uniformitarianism, had uncovered the secrets of
the atom. Armed with new understanding and new instruments, they were ready
to provide a precise answer to the question that had puzzled scholars for centuries:
how old is the Earth? The answer would turn out to be greater than even Arthur
Holmes had conceived. Never again would a scientist espouse an age of the Earth
of 100 million years, nor even 1,000 million. The question now was not whether
the Earth is billions of years old but exactly how many billions.
