![]() The process of assigning actual ages –in years before the present date– is referred to as numerical (absolute) dating, which is covered in a later section. For example, most dinosaur species went extinct 66 mya. Sometimes geologists use “kya” and “mya” to characterize events that occurred, respectively, thousands or millions of years ago. Similarly, one million years is represented by “Ma,” meaning “mega annum.” One billion years is abbreviated as “Ga” for “giga annum.” These prefixes are also used to describe computer memory: kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabytes of storage. One thousand years is represented by the abbreviation “ka,” which means “kilo-annum.” The prefix “kilo-” should be familiar to you: a kilogram equals one thousand grams and a kilometer equals one thousand meters “annum” means year. They use certain conventions for abbreviating intervals of time. Geologists measure events in Earth’s history in years before the present date. That is a long time… Abbreviating geological time Typically there are 6 reams of paper per box, that makes 304 boxes of copy paper just to print out the number of zeros in the age of the Earth. How many reams of paper would you need to replicate the age of the Earth? How many copies would you need to print to cover the age of the Earth with each year represented by 1 zero?Ĥ,566,000,000 / 5000 = 913,200 sheets of paperĬopy paper is bundled by 500 sheets. Now, how many copies would you need to print to reach one-billion zeros?ġ,000,000,000 / 5,000 = 200,000 sheets of paper How many copies of this image (or sheets of paper) would you need to print to reach a total of a million zeros? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Have a look at the image below (or download this PDF file ), which illustrates 5,000 individual zeros. ![]() Deep time is truly staggering, a view captured eloquently in a recent essay in the New York Times by Peter Brannen. Essayist John McPhee coined the phrase “ deep time ” in his 1981 book, Basin and Range. This is the difficulty in trying to understand the vastness of geological time-which is measured by millions and billions of years. If you think about large numbers and try to comprehend the difference in the amounts, say the difference between 50,000 and 50,000,000, you have no frame of reference to visualize the difference. Understanding geological time is central to properly understanding our place in nature and history. Instead, in the context of an Earth that is 4.566 billion years old, modern human civilization hardly registers at all, amounting to a trivially small sliver (~0.0003%) of Earth’s history. Why does it matter? If Earth were only a mere 10,000 years old, then human civilization would represent a significantly large portion of Earth’s history. Instead, the discovery of Earth’s great antiquity is the crowning achievement of the geosciences. Knowing this is not simply some esoteric piece of trivia.
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