The Earth is very old 41/2 billion years or more according to recent estimates. This vast span of time, called geologic time by earth scientists, is difficult to comprehend in the familiar time units of months and years, or even centuries. How then do scientists reckon geologic time, and why do they believe the Earth… Read more

Relative dating is used to arrange geological events, and the rocks they leave behind, in a sequence. The method of reading the order is called stratigraphy (layers of rock are called strata). Relative dating does not provide actual numerical dates for the rocks. Fossils and relative dating Fossils are important for working out the relative ages of sedimentary… Read more

Our planet did not come with a guidebook. It has taken generations of scientists building upon one another’s ideas and research to compile our current understanding of the earth’s systems and history. However, our planet did come with clues to its long history, and it is the work of geologists, archaeologists, and others to sleuth… Read more

The age of the Earth is estimated to be 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years (4.54 × 109 years ± 1%).[ This age may represent the age of the Earth’s accretion, of core formation, or of the material from which the Earth formed. This dating is based on evidence from radiometric age-dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the radiometric ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples. Following the… Read more

The Crust The crust is everything we can see and study directly. The thinnest layer of the Earth, the crust still measures about 40 km on average, ranging from 5–70 km (~3–44 miles) in depth. But at the scale of the planet, that’s less than the skin of an apple. There are two types of crust: continental and… Read more

Continental drift is the theory that the Earth’s continents have moved over geologic time relative to each other, thus appearing to have “drifted” across the ocean bed. The speculation that continents might have ‘drifted’ was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596. The concept was independently and more fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, but his theory was rejected by… Read more

Developed from the 1950s through the 1970s, plate tectonics is the modern version of continental drift, a theory first proposed by scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912. Wegener didn’t have an explanation for how continents could move around the planet, but researchers do now. Plate tectonics is the unifying theory of geology, said Nicholas van der… Read more