It's All About Time
How long is a long time to you? We are accustomed to thinking about time in minutes, hours, and days. Periods of years or several years often feel like a very long time. But to geologists, a few years is so tiny it is practically insignificant. Geologists speak of time in terms of millions and even billions of years. Earth, for example, is 4.65 billion years old. That is 4,650,000,000 years! If you started counting right now, and counted one number per second, it would take you more than 147 years to count to 4,650,000,000. That is an amazingly large number, but it is exactly the kind of number that geologists deal with in their work. It is on time scales of millions and billions of years that rock structures form, deep canyons take shape, and organisms, such as dinosaurs, developed and later became extinct. Click on each image below to see just a few examples of how old things can be.
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