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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.
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 discovery of radioactive decay by Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, and Pierre Curie laid the ground work for radiometric dating, but the knowledge and tools required for accurate determination of radiometric ages would not be in place until the mid-1950s. [3]
Radiometric dating of these rocks shows that the Moon is 4.53 ± 0.01 billion years old, [46] formed at least 30 million years after the Solar System. [47] New evidence suggests the Moon formed even later, 4.48 ± 0.02 Ga, or 70–110 million years after the start of the Solar System.
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]
Some examples of both radiometric and non-radiometric absolute dating methods are the following: Amino acid dating [10] ... Age of Earth; Age of the universe ...
Arthur Holmes FRS FRSE (14 January 1890 – 20 September 1965) was an English geologist who made two major contributions to the understanding of geology. He pioneered the use of radiometric dating of minerals, and was the first earth scientist to grasp the mechanical and thermal implications of mantle convection, which led eventually to the acceptance of plate tectonics.