RE: How can we know how old fossils are?
April 30, 2019 at 3:45 pm
(This post was last modified: April 30, 2019 at 3:49 pm by polymath257.)
(April 30, 2019 at 2:35 pm)jamesmadison Wrote: Ok but even radioactive decay, can you honestly explain that? If we don't know for sure the atmospheric conditions could that of affected the process of aging for the rocks? different climates and such, if not just let me know, I'm not a fucking geologist, just very curious.
Nuclear reactions are not affected by atmospheric conditions. They aren't affected by climate. They aren't affected by chemistry. That's one of the amazing things about them: to affect them requires energies corresponding to nuclear bombs.
So unless you have nuclear bombs going off, the rates of radioactive decay aren't going to be changing.
(April 30, 2019 at 3:05 pm)jamesmadison Wrote: So is there any temperature in which the rocks couldn't survive throughout human history? Does the fact we have aged the rocks and shows the earth's age make you question, well what if there were rocks before them but the temperature was as hot as whatever it needs to be that it didn't survive, IDK that temp, just saying. Is this making sense?
Sure, the rocks can be melted. That is where lava comes from, after all.
But once the rocks have solidified, they have a crystal structure that we can look at and determine whether they have been modified. And the rates of radioactivity aren't going to be affected by things like melting, or climate. Even if you had an atom on the surface of the sun, the rate of radioactive decay would not change much (less than 1% and less than that for the ones used for dating).
