Taking Time - Seminar 2 - Geology and Time

One aspect that can be difficult to grasp when first studying geology is the timescales involved.  Humans normal consider time in terms of hours, days, months, years decades and centuries.  The geologists generally consider time in terms of millions of years.  Anything less than 10,000 years is not considered to be significant!  This is because of the long timescales that geological processes occur over.

The second Seminar focuses on Time and its relationship to Geology.  I look at the timescales relevant to the geologist in terms of the Age of the Earth and the geological periods before looking at how the geologist dates rocks using a variety of techniques including Radiometric Dating. 

There is an old story of a museum guide who was leading a tour around a natural history museum and stopping beside the skeleton of a dinosaur he proudly stated that it was 60,000,007 years old.  The people in the group were impressed and one asked how the skeleton could be dated that accurately.  The answer was "the skeleton was dated by an expert to be 60,000,000 years old and that was 7 years ago".  Geology does not use that precise a timescale!

Here is the recording of Seminar 2 freshly compressed for the viewer.