What does absolute dating of a rock tell us

Geologic Age Dating Explained

As we learned in the previous lesson, index fossils and superposition are effective methods of determining the relative age of objects. In other words, you can use superposition to tell you that one rock layer is older than another. But determining the absolute age of a substance its age in years is a much greater challenge. To accomplish this, scientists use a variety of evidence, from tree rings to the amounts of radioactive materials in a rock. In regions outside the tropics, trees grow more quickly during the warm summer months than during the cooler winter. Each dark band represents a winter; by counting rings it is possible to find the age of the tree Figure The width of a series of growth rings can give clues to past climates and various disruptions such as forest fires. Droughts and other variations in the climate make the tree grow slower or faster than normal, which shows up in the widths of the tree rings. These tree ring variations will appear in all trees growing in a certain region, so scientists can match up the growth rings of living and dead trees.

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Allmon and Robert M. Ross Answering this frequently encountered question in geology requires two separate steps. They correspond to two different ways that we express how old something or someone is in our everyday experience. When we ask how old an object or a person is, we can answer either with a number or by comparison to something or someone else.

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Geological time — 1. Relative age dating — 2.

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Dating Rocks and Fossils Using Geologic Methods

Relative dating is used to determine the relative order of past events by comparing the age of one object to another. This determines where in a timescale the object fits without finding its specific age; for example you could say you're older than your sister which tells us the order of your birth but we don't know what age either of you are. There are a few methods of relative dating, one of these methods is by studying the stratigraphy. Stratigraphy is the study of the order of the layers of rocks and where they fit in the geological timescale.

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