how is it possible for scientists to determine what happened millions of years ago?

Question

the way i look at it, it is impossible for anyone to come to such conclusions of exactly what happened. please if anyone knows the answer, i would love to learn more about it

Answer 1

By laying aside presumption and actually looking.
By careful observation and analysis.
By doing what the average person can't, seeing past the end of their own noses.
By examining the real world and drawing conclusions based on what can be seen and unambiguously proved.
By being able to see the world in a way that isn't obscured by self-interested ideology.
By recognizing personal and societal fallibility and fighting against it.
By being the most thorough critics of their own conclusions.
By being able to lay aside appealing ideas that aren't supported by experiments and observations.
By not trying to by an authority unto themselves, science isn't just any one persons opinion, it is the aggregate of generations of hammering away at ignorance trying to figure out the truth.

Answer 2

Exactly what happened? If you read the news you'll see that it's not possible to determine exactly what happened yesterday.

Nevertheless, scientists have a variety of tools for determining the ages of ancient fossils and geological formations. The principal dating tool is radioisotope dating. Radioactive elements decay at a steady rate, leaving behind characteristic daughter elements. When a rock is melted, the daughter elements are separated from the radioisotopes, effectively resetting the clock. By measuring the proportion of the parent element to its daughter elements, scientists can tell how long ago the rock was formed. They can often get estimates from several different radioisotopes, to provide a crosscheck.

There are also relative dating techniques, such as looking at the layers of sediment in an area. Some layers bear distinctive markers that enable them to be identified with a specific event. For example, the meteorite impact that marked the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago left a distinctive layer of iridium-rich dust.

Some parts of the Atlantic ocean floor show stripes of varying magnetization. These rocks provide a record of the fluctuations of the Earth's magnetic field. So the magnetization in a rock, if it has not been disturbed, can be used to estimate when it formed.

Answer 3

Many things. Scietists study the evidence found, study cause and effect and may take a lot of assumptions as well to postulate a theory - sometimes the are not proven but just remain a theory.

Like for example, fossils found can prove that dinosaurs existed while the red shift in distant nebulas and distant galaxies in every direction are going away from us with speeds proportional to their distance made scientists propose the Big Bang theory.

Answer 4

Good question!.
The only things we can be sure of are the things we can see and check for ourselves. If other people have observed things and written them down then that can give us good reason to believe things in the past - especially if written down by several independant witnesses.
Most people think the world is billions of years old. I do not. Things which are claimed to be old are *interpreted* to be old by certain assumptions about the past.
When people claim to know what happened 'millions' of years ago, my first reaction is to ask 'how to you know?'. 'Were you there?'
Check their assunptions!

It is not possible t tell that ice cores are 100000 years old. That age is an infered age based on (uniformitarian) assumptions.
Likewise, radiometric dating does not prove an ancient earth. It requires many assumptions to make it work. Volcanic rock known to be just a few years old was dated as millions of years old.
Radiometric makes unverifiable assumptions about the original amounts of parent and child isotopes, the rate of decay, and any leaching/contamination.
When a result does not fit into preconceived ideas of expected age, then the the data is fudged to fit - "there must have been contaminaton".

Another common 'proof' of age is the fossil record. Fossils are dated by the age of the rock they're found in. And how do they age the rocks? Well by the age of the fossils! All based on the *assumption* of billons of years of evolution. A more credible explanation is that the rocks and fossils were laid down by the global flood. The world is covered in thick layers of sedimentary rock, laidd down by water, containing billions of dead things. We don't see this happening now. You don't fossilise a dinosaur one millimetre at a time. fossilisation requires rapid burial. Indeed there are fossils of creatures giving birth and in the middle of eating. Obviously buried suddenly.

Most dating methods indicate that the earth is young!
For example the saltiness of the sea, the amount of argon in rocks, recession of the moon, decay of earth's magnetic field.
Check out www.AnswersinGenesis.org and search fo age of the earth.

Check peoples' assumptions!

Answer 5

It isn't at all possible.
First, the earth is less than 8 thousand years old, not millions, as we have been brainwashed to believe by our schools.
Second, carbon dating is so inaccurate, as admitted BY scientists. (Recently, they carbon dated a LIVE penguin to be millions of years old!! Also- dinosaur remains were carbon dated-some of the bones were several million years old, some of the SAME bones were determined to be even older! FROM THE SAME DINOSAUR!) How can this be?????
Third, "IN the beginning", less than 8,000 years ago, God created the earth, people, space, time, animals, etc, etc.
On the internet, I suggest you look up "Creation Science", my dear, and see for yourself what they say, then maybe YOU can join the few who dare to NOT CONFORM to these absurd theories.

Answer 6

We have ice cores from Antarctica and the Greenland Ice cap that go back 100,000s of years.

We have sediment cores from the bottoms of lakes and oceans that go back millions of years.

And we have geological evidence galore.

Answer 7

with technology - just try and figure out how a computer works the way it does; but it does

Answer 8

they don't know what really happen