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● Scientists began studying radioactive isotopes and decay to determine the age of the Earth.
● Law of Uniformitarianism: the idea that geological, physical, and chemical laws operate today as they did long ago. Led to the idea of absolute dating.
● Relative Dating: used by scientists to tell the relative ages of some rocks in a formation compared to other rocks. Cannot be used to determine the exact age of a rock. Scientists used relative dating to tell which layers of rocks in the strata formed first or last. Several laws are used to find the relative ages of rock layers.
○ Law of Superposition: the oldest layers of rocks are at the bottom, the youngest rocks are at the top.
○ Law of Crosscutting: when a rock cuts through other layers of rocks, the rock that is cutting through the other layers is younger than the rocks it cuts through.
■ Layer A in the diagram is the oldest
■ Layer B in the diagram is the younger
■ Layer C in the diagram is the youngest
○ Law of Inclusion: the rock inclusion from another rock is older than the rock surrounding it.
● By using the process of correlation, scientists can match rocks at different locations that formed at the same time by the same processes to draw conclusions. For example, if scientists found fossils of marine animals in another state and the original site, they could draw a conclusion that both areas were covered by water at that time.
● Fossils: the preserved remains or traces of an organism that lived in the past. Only a few plants and animals become fossils. Often organic material decays before it can become fossilized. Being buried or buried in rocks increases the chance of an organism becoming a fossil. The fossil record tells us what organisms and species lived on the Earth in the past and what the environment was like.
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