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Descriptive Information

Title

The Association of Lead with Uranium in Rock-Minerals

Description

After Rutherford first demonstrated the incredible promise of radiometric dating in 1905, the geochronologist Arthur Holmes applied the technique widely throughout a long and prolific career. His approach focused on the parent-daughter pair of uranium and lead, and his measurements of lead and uranium ratios were global in scope. The table shown here from his paper, “The Association of Lead with Uranium in Rock-Minerals, and its Application to the Measurement of Geological Time” (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1911), represents an early result. The most striking features of this table are the antiquity of the listed ages, particularly the “Pre-Cambrian” ages that stretch into the billions of years. Such numbers greatly exceeded any of Lord Kelvin’s calculations. Holmes later estimated, from these and other results, that the Earth was 1-3 billion years old, a number that was of the correct order of magnitude for the consensus age used by modern geologists.

Call Number (click link to view in library catalog)

506 ROPser.A

See Also

Full Text Available at JSTOR

Authors

Holmes, Arthur

Date

1911

From the Exhibit

In Search of Lost Time: Radioactivity and the Science of Geochronology

Publisher

Harrison and Son

Location

London

Language

English

Rights

This item was originally published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Intellectual property rights, including copyright, may reside with the materials' creator(s) or their heirs. The content was downloaded from JSTOR on 4/4/2023. JSTOR terms and conditions of use can be found here: https://about.jstor.org/terms/.

Type

Text

Medium

Article

Bibliographic Citation

Holmes, Arthur. “The Association of Lead with Uranium in Rock-Minerals, and its Application to the Measurement of Geological Time”. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A 85 (1911): 248-256.