Scientific knowledge of Earth’s geologic history has advanced significantly since the development of radiometric dating , a method of age determination based on the principle that radioactive atoms in geologic materials decay at constant, known rates to daughter atoms. Radiometric dating has provided not only a means of numerically quantifying geologic time but also a tool for determining the age of various rocks that predate the appearance of life-forms.

Fossils help geologists establish the ages of layers of rock. In this diagram, sections A and B represent rock layers 200 miles (320 km) apart. Their ages can be established by comparing the fossils in each layer.

For years investigators determined the relative ages of sedimentary rock strata on the basis of their positions in an outcrop and their fossil content. According to a long-standing principle of the geosciences, that of superposition, the oldest layer within a sequence of strata is at the base and the layers are progressively younger with ascending order. The relative ages of the rock strata deduced in this manner can be corroborated and at times refined by the examination of the fossil forms present. The tracing and matching of the fossil content of separate rock outcrops (i.e., correlation) eventually enabled investigators to integrate rock sequences in many areas of the world and construct a relative geologic time scale.

Earth’s surface is a complex mosaic of exposures of different rock types that are assembled in an astonishing array of geometries and sequences. Individual rocks in the myriad of rock outcroppings (or in some instances shallow subsurface occurrences) contain certain materials or mineralogic information that can provide insight as to their “age.”

The steep walls of the Grand Canyon contain a number of layers of sedimentary rock laid down over millions of years. The lower formations belong to the early Precambrian age, while the upper layers are of the Paleozoic age. The line between the two sets of formations is called the Great Unconformity.

Geochronology , field of scientific investigation concerned with determining the age and history of Earth’s rocks and rock assemblages. Such time determinations are made and the record of past geologic events is deciphered by studying the distribution and succession of rock strata, as well as the character of the fossil organisms preserved within the strata.

Early views and discoveries

Some estimates suggest that as much as 70 percent of all rocks outcropping from the Earth’s surface are sedimentary. Preserved in these rocks is the complex record of the many transgressions and regressions of the sea, as well as the fossil remains or other indications of now extinct organisms and the petrified sands and gravels of ancient beaches, sand dunes, and rivers.

Herodotus Statue of seated man said to be Herodotus; in the Louvre, Paris. © Photos.com/Jupiterimages

Modern scientific understanding of the complicated story told by the rock record is rooted in the long history of observations and interpretations of natural phenomena extending back to the early Greek scholars. Xenophanes of Colophon (560?–478? bc), for one, saw no difficulty in describing the various seashells and images of life-forms embedded in rocks as the remains of long-deceased organisms. In the correct spirit but for the wrong reasons, Herodotus (5th century bc) felt that the small discoidal nummulitic petrifactions (actually the fossils of ancient lime-secreting marine protozoans) found in limestones outcropping at al-Jīzah, Egypt, were the preserved remains of discarded lentils left behind by the builders of the pyramids.

These early observations and interpretations represent the unstated origins of what was later to become a basic principle of uniformitarianism, the root of any attempt at linking the past (as preserved in the rock record) to the present. Loosely stated, the principle says that the various natural phenomena observed today must also have existed in the past (see below The emergence of modern geologic thought: Lyell’s promulgation of uniformitarianism).

Although quite varied opinions about the history and origins of life and of the Earth itself existed in the pre-Christian era, a divergence between Western and Eastern thought on the subject of natural history became more pronounced as a result of the extension of Christian dogma to the explanation of natural phenomena. Increasing constraints were placed upon the interpretation of nature in view of the teachings of the Bible. This required that the Earth be conceived of as a static, unchanging body, with a history that began in the not too distant past, perhaps as little as 6,000 years earlier, and an end, according to the scriptures, that was in the not too distant future. This biblical history of the Earth left little room for interpreting the Earth as a dynamic, changing system. Past catastrophes, particularly those that may have been responsible for altering the Earth’s surface such as the great flood of Noah, were considered an artifact of the earliest formative history of the Earth. As such, they were considered unlikely to recur on what was thought to be an unchanging world.

With the exception of a few prescient individuals such as Roger Bacon (c. 1220–92) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), no one stepped forward to champion an enlightened view of the natural history of the Earth until the mid-17th century. Leonardo seems to have been among the first of the Renaissance scholars to “rediscover” the uniformitarian dogma through his observations of fossil marine organisms and sediments exposed in the hills of northern Italy. He recognized that the marine organisms now found as fossils in rocks exposed in the Tuscan Hills were simply ancient animals that lived in the region when it had been covered by the sea and were eventually buried by muds along the seafloor. He also recognized that the rivers of northern Italy, flowing south from the Alps and emptying into the sea, had done so for a very long time.

In spite of this deductive approach to interpreting natural events and the possibility that they might be preserved and later observed as part of a rock outcropping, little or no attention was given to the history—namely, the sequence of events in their natural progression—that might be preserved in these same rocks.