[meteorite-list] Meteorites Used to Calculate Earth's Age

From: Walter Branch <branchw_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:32:55 2004
Message-ID: <00ad01c413cd$7e5464e0$383cdc44_at_wbranch>

Hi Richard,

Thanks very much for the reference and the post!

-Walter
------------------------------------------
www.branchmeteorites.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Kuzma" <rkuzma01_at_juno.com>
To: <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2004 9:05 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Meteorites Used to Calculate Earth's Age


> For those who have an interest; I just came across a reference to the key
> role meteorites played in determining the final (and currently accepted)
> date for calculating the age of the earth. The source is a book titled
> "The Man Who Found Time", by: Jack Repcheck (page 204). (The book is
> about James Hutton, who advanced the first persuasive argument that the
> Earth was older than the then accepted "biblically" calculated age.)
>
> Briefly quoting the relevant portion of the text -
>
> "The final breakthrough came in the 1950s, when Claire Patterson, of
> Caltech, realized that the only way to get a completely accurate
> measurement of common lead decay was to leave the planet.....focus[ed] on
> objects ... [that] allowed for more accurate lead decay calculations -
> meteorites. As Claire Patterson later related:
>
> 'Lead in iron meteorites was the kind of lead that was in the solar
> system when it was first formed, and ... it was preserved in iron
> meteorites without change from uranium decay, because there is no uranium
> in iron meteorites....'
>
> By 1956, Patterson had calculated the age of the earth to be 4.6 billion
> years...."
>
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Received on Sat 27 Mar 2004 02:31:17 AM PST