The Age of the Earth

See Article History Alternative Title: The important characteristic of common lead is that it contains no significant proportion of radiogenic lead accumulated since the time that the mineral or rock phase was formed. Of the four isotopes of lead, two are formed from the uranium isotopes and one is formed from the thorium isotope; only lead is not known to have any long-lived radioactive progenitor.

Primordial lead is thought to have been formed by stellar nuclear reactions, released to space by supernovae explosions, and incorporated within the dust cloud that constituted the primordial solar system; the troilite iron sulfide phase of iron meteorites contains lead that approximates the primordial composition. The lead incorporated within the Earth has been evolving continuously from primordial lead and from the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium isotopes.

Uranium–lead dating, abbreviated U–Pb dating, is one of the oldest and most refined of the radiometric dating schemes. It can be used to date rocks that formed from about 1 million years to over billion years ago with routine precisions in the –1 percent range.

The isochron method Many radioactive dating methods are based on minute additions of daughter products to a rock or mineral in which a considerable amount of daughter-type isotopes already exists. These isotopes did not come from radioactive decay in the system but rather formed during the original creation of the elements. In this case, it is a big advantage to present the data in a form in which the abundance of both the parent and daughter isotopes are given with respect to the abundance of the initial background daughter.

The incremental additions of the daughter type can then be viewed in proportion to the abundance of parent atoms. In mathematical terms this is achieved as follows. This term, shown in Figure 1, is called the initial ratio. The slope is proportional to the geologic age of the system. In practice, the isochron approach has many inherent advantages.

When a single body of liquid rock crystallizes, parent and daughter elements may separate so that, once solid, the isotopic data would define a series of points, such as those shown as open circles designated R1, R2, R3 in Figure 1. With time each would then develop additional daughter abundances in proportion to the amount of parent present.