2007-02-04 23:49:20 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Earth Sciences & Geology
Approximately 4.5 billion years.
For people like Mahal that mistrust radiation dating. they should read up on isochron dating. Their mistrust is based on ignorance and not on a rigorous study of the theory.
What compels such people to consider that they are qualified to answer geology-related questions is beyond me.
2007-02-04 23:58:32 · answer #1 · answered by gebobs 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I personally don't trust radiation dating. I don't understand how we can calculate the age of the earth based on a radiation pattern when we don't know all the things in the environment that affect the pattern.
For example, carbon dating is known to have serious flaws, and scientists are trying to cope with various environemental factors that are known to have altered the ratios between c-12 and c-14, such as volcanic eruptions.
I first ran into this problem as a student about 20 years ago when a research team (not a religious one) was studying dendrochronology in Europe (tree ring analysis). They just happened to be carbon dating some of their samples, and there were several times when adjacent tree rings were dated as being 1500 years or more apart from each other! They should actually be only a year apart at the most, and such a large difference would seem to indicate a catastrophic event in the intervening period that skewed the results of one of the rings.
2007-02-05 07:58:22 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 2⤋
Geologists now think the Earth is about four and a half billion years old.
2007-02-05 08:00:47 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Most scientists believe that it is 4.5 billion years old.
2007-02-05 07:54:13 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
4.55 billion years old.
2007-02-05 07:54:04 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋