s, and t date inorganicmaterials like rocks at all, ermine t.
ting rocks one point almost everyone in t not been for a determined Englis migo abeyance altogether.
acles s he achieved.
By t offasement of ticularly in Britain, its spiritual birt Dury, ire geology department. Often o borrocoget inorder to pursue ric dating of rocks. At one point, ions ivelyed for ty to provide o drop out of academic life altogeto earn enougosupport ime le upon tyne—and sometimes even afford ty.
tecically straiglyfrom t observed by Ernest Rutoms decayfrom one element into anot a rate predictable enoug you can use t takes for potassium-40 to become argon-40, and you measure ts of eac erial is. ributiono measure te of uranium into lead to calculate th.
But tecies to overcome. leasted gadgetry of a sort t could make veryfine measurements from tiny samples, and as asimple adding mac e an ac t least tunately, yet anot to acceptance: tiveness of ists. Alto praise ained t t merely terials fromwh had been formed.
It at time t y of Cing lead isotopes in igneous rocks ( edting, as opposed to ts). Realizing t tedious, to young Clair Patterson as ation project.
Famously terson t determining t, it ake years.
Patterson began in 1948. Compared ributions to tterson’s discovery of touciclimactic. For seven years, first at ty of Ctitute of tecerile lab,making very precise measurements of tios in carefully selected samples ofold rock.
t you needed rocks t remely ancient, containing lead- and uranium-bearing crystals t as old as t itself—anytes—but really ancient rocks are only rarely found on Earte 1940s no onealtogetood o t for e tectonics, o.) Patterson,meantime, to try to make sense of ted materials. Eventually, andingeniously, it occurred to tage by using rocksfrom beyond Earturned to meteorites.
tion correct as it turned out— manymeteorites are essentially leftover building materials from tem,and to preserve a more or