This timeline provides a look at some of the historical aspects in finding out the age of the Earth. Find about more the developments in how geologists find out the ages of rocks and fossils.
1860 – Earth ancient, but no date
Many geologists have evidence1 that Earth is ancient but cannot give an actual date as they only have relative dating2 methods. Some still use the Bible and other religious texts to support the idea that Earth is only about 6,000 years old.
1862 – Earth 100 million years old
William Thomson (later called Lord Kelvin) estimates the Earth is 100 million years old, based on its cooling from a very hot creation. He is a long way out, because he does not know about the heat3 from natural radioactivity4.
1896 – Radioactivity discovered
Antoine Henri Becquerel discovers the radioactivity of uranium. The actual term ‘radioactivity’ is not used until 2 years later by Marie and Pierre Curie.
1902 – Radioactive decay
Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy work out the cause and nature of radioactive decay5.
1903 – Heat from radioactivity
George Darwin and John Joly point out that the newly discovered heat from radioactivity in rocks would upset earlier assumptions about the scientific age of the Earth.
1905 – A way to date rocks
Ernest Rutherford suggests that it should be possible to use radioactive6 elements7 with long half-lives, such as uranium, to work out the ages of rocks.
1907 – A new age for Earth
Bertram Boltwood uses the ratios of uranium and its decay product, lead, in rocks to suggest dates of 92–570 million years.
1911 – Even earlier dates
Arthur Holmes improves on Boltwood’s work. Rock determined to be Carboniferous by relative dating is 340 million years old, a Precambrian rock is 1,640 million years old. These dates are not widely accepted, as they disagree with earlier dating methods.
1920 – Mass spectrometer
Francis Aston invents the mass spectrometer8 for studying isotopes9, which have only been known about for a few years.
1927 – Not the oldest rocks
Arthur Holmes suggests that Earth is 1.6–3 billion years old. He realises that all the rocks being chemically dated were formed a long time after Earth was first formed.
1941 – 3.2 billion years old
EK Gerling estimates the age of the Earth as 3.2 billion years. He bases this on rocks he thinks are from the time when Earth was formed. These rocks are later shown to come from after Earth’s formation.
1946 – A better instrument
Alfred Nier improves the mass10 spectrometer11, making it easier for geologists around the world to measure isotopes.
1950 – Looking for oldest rocks
By now, isotope12 dating has become fairly precise. There is still a problem finding rocks from the earliest formation of Earth, as they have mostly been reworked through the rock cycle.
1956 – Meteorites
Clair Patterson realises that some meteorites were formed at the same time as the Earth and have stayed unchanged. He gets the age of 4.55 ± 0.3 billion years from the Canyon Diablo meteorite13.
1972 – Moon rock
The oldest rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo 17 mission have radiometric dates of up to 4.5 billion years. It is thought that the Moon formed at a similar time to Earth.
1983 -–Oldest crystals
Zircon14 crystals in Western Australia are dated to 4.2 billion years old. The zircon has now become part of younger rocks but has not changed since it was first formed.
2007 – Oldest Earth rocks
The oldest known rocks, called Acasta gneiss, are found in Canada, dated at 4.03 billion years old. The 1983 Australian crystals are older, but are no longer in their original rock.
2010 – Improved error range
Many meteorites have now been dated, improving Patterson’s 1956 age of the Earth of 4.55 ± 0.3 billion years to 4.55 ± 0.02 billion years. This reduction in error15 means that geologists have become more confident in their estimates of the age of the Earth.
2018 – Dating Zealandia
Zircons found along the South and Stewart Islands came from rocks as old as 1.3 billion years, suggesting Zealandia's crust16 is much older than once believed.
Related content
Use Developing the New Zealand geological timescale to learn about how geologists have built up an international timescale of Earth’s history, based on relative and absolute dating methods. New Zealand scientists have added to this to reflect the country’s unique history.
Discover the two violent tectonic events that shaped the continent Zealandia and what makes this submerged continent so different to others.
Read how scientists are using cosmogenic surface exposure dating, an absolute dating17 method in A clock in the rocks – cosmic rays and Earth science.
Activity ideas
Help your students understand more about timescales, big numbers and different dating methods with one of these activities below:
Build a timescale – develop a timescale for a person’s life. The techniques of relative and absolute dating are similar to those used in the construction of a geological timescale.
Big numbers in science – investigate the use of big numbers, such as millions and billions, and they encounter ways to understand what these big numbers mean.
- evidence: Data, or information, used to prove or disprove something.
- relative dating: Putting a series of events or objects, such as rock layers, in chronological order, but does not include actual dates.
- heat energy (heat): Heat energy: the transfer of energy in materials from the random movement of the particles in that material. The greater the random movement of particles the more heat energy the material has. Temperature is a measure of the heat energy of a material.
Heat: the flow of energy from a warm object to a cooler object. - radioactivity: The spontaneous emission of radiation from an atom’s nucleus.
- radioactive decay: The process in which an unstable atomic nucleus loses energy by emitting radiation. This decay, or loss of energy, results in an atom of one type, called the parent nuclide, transforming to an atom of a different type, called the daughter nuclide. The average time interval required for one-half of any quantity of identical radioactive atoms to undergo radioactive decay is called half life.
- radioactive: Giving off energy as a result of the breaking up of nuclei of atoms. Something undergoing radioactive decay, the process by which an unstable atom emits radiation.
- element: A substance made of atoms that all have the same atomic number. Elements cannot be split into simpler substances using normal chemical methods.
- mass spectrometer: An instrument that can measure the mass of atoms.
- isotope: Different forms of atoms of the same element. Within the nucleus, there is the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons, giving each isotope a different atomic mass.
- mass: The amount of matter an object has, measured in kilograms.
- spectrometer: An instrument that collects information about the different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum coming from a light source.
- isotope: Different forms of atoms of the same element. Within the nucleus, there is the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons, giving each isotope a different atomic mass.
- meteorite: A piece of matter from space that falls to the Earth’s surface. Most extraterrestrial material is in the form of dust, but larger metallic or rocky meteorites sometimes make it through the Earth’s atmosphere.
- zircon: A mineral found in igneous rocks and in sedimentary rocks made up from fragments of igneous material. It often contains radioactive elements, which makes it useful in some radiometric dating techniques.
- error: The difference between the measured result and the accepted value is the error in the result.
- error = measured value – accepted value %
- error = (error in measurement/accepted value) x 100
- crust: The outermost layer of the Earth. Estimated to be between 5–50 km thick. Made of solid rock of all types (metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary).
- absolute dating: Finding the actual dates of geological or archaeological objects. Normally expressed as calendar years ago.
