These results, a total of 1,400,000,000 years, greatly transcend Lord
Rayleigh’s (Strutt’s) earlier calculations regarding the antiquity they
assign to Paleozoic and Pre-Cambrian times.
In 1918, Prof. Joseph Barrell reviewed the various methods employed
and the results obtained in the attempt to determine from geological,
chemical and physical evidences the time that has elapsed since the
beginning of the Cambrian Period (when abundant fossil invertebrates
are first met with), and reached the following time estimates for
the principal divisions of the geologic record (exclusive of the
Pre-Cambrian rocks):
Cenozoic time, 55,000,000 to 65,000,000 years long
Mesozoic time, 135,000,000 to 180,000,000 years long
Paleozoic time, 360,000,000 to 540,000,000 years long
The time thus established covers a period of from 550,000,000 to
700,000,000 years, or from ten to 15 times longer than has usually been
accepted by geologists. Pre-Cambrian time was found to have a similar
order of magnitude; but here the evidence rests largely upon the
radioactivity of the crystalline rocks formed during this vast period.
It is now universally accepted that the time required for the formation
of the Pre-Cambrian rocks was fully as long as, if not longer than,
that for the succeeding geological divisions. The Archaean deposits
have a vertical thickness, in the regions north of the Great Lakes,
estimated at about 65,000 feet, or 12 miles. Their base, as a matter
of fact, has never been reached. It is interesting to note that the
granites of Norway, Canada, Texas and East Africa have an indicated age
of 1,120,000,000 years, measured in terms of radium products. Prof.
Henry Norris Russell, of Princeton University, concludes, from his
careful investigations in radioactivity, that the age of the earth is
“a moderate multiple of 1000 million years.”
Professor Joly has computed that if there are two parts of radioactive
material for every million million parts of other matter throughout the
whole volume of the earth, and this is considerably less than he has
found on the average in the earth’s crust, then this earth, instead of
cooling off, is actually now heating up, so that in a hundred million
years the temperature of the core will have risen through 1,800 degrees
centigrade.
Dr. Millikan observes (_Science_, July 9, 1921) that this is a
temperature “which will melt almost all of our ordinary substances....
It means that a planet that seems to be dead, as this our earth seems
to be, may, a few eons hence, be a luminous body, and that it may go
through periods of expansion when it radiates enormously, and then of
contraction when it becomes like our present earth, a body which is
a heat insulator and holds in its interior the energy given off by
radioactive processes, until another period of luminosity ensues.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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