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Putting Numbers on Geologic Ages

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Abstract

The uranium, thorium and lead dating methods completely changed scientists’ idea of the age of the Earth from about 90 million years to more than 2 billion years.

As there is not in human observation proper means for measuring the waste of land upon the globe, it is hence inferred, that we cannot estimate the duration of what we see at present, nor calculate the period at which it had begun; so that, with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end.

James Hutton—1785

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Correspondence to William W. Hay .

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Hay, W.W. (2016). Putting Numbers on Geologic Ages . In: Experimenting on a Small Planet. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27404-1_5

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