Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 54, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 March 1911 — AGE OF THE EARTH COMPUTED [ARTICLE]

AGE OF THE EARTH COMPUTED

Calculation Based on Quality of Salts In Sea Water Makes It Hundred Million Years. An estimate based on a comparison of the quantity of salts in sea water with the quantity continuously supplied by the inflow, shows that.nearly a hundred million years passed before the oceans attained their present condition. According to this estimate, dating from the time when the waters of the great deep condensed to form oceans, the minimum age of the earth Is one hundred million years.

Sir Archibald Geikle calculates the age of the earth by the time occupied In the forming, of the stratified or sedimentary layers of the terrestrial crust: Judging the formations of the' remote past by relatively recent formations, he declares that a period of between thirty centuries and two hundred centuries must have passed during the formation of every depth of a meter; the time having varied according to the composition of the strata. Admitting that estimate, if the total thickness of all the strata is 30,000 meters, as It Is supposed to he, between ninety million and six hundred million years were consumed in the course of the earth’s, stratification.

But science gives another way to estimate the age of the earth. On the earth’s surface there is a very sensible compensation between the heat that the sun sends us and the heat that the terrestrial crust loses by radiation from its surface toward cold and infinite space. While the crust ia losing by radiation, the center of the earth is slowly but Incessantly cooling, and, as it Pools, gradually contracting. The contraction causes the center to recede or slip away from the surface of the crust, and the crust, nolonger supported by the center, sinks here and there, forming folds similar to the wrinkles on a withered apple. These folds or wrinkles are the mountain chains. The total superficies of the mountain chains constitutes about 1% per cent, of the total surface of the globe. This fact leads to the Inference that the radius of the earth has shrunk a little less than one-hun-dredth of its primitive length.

Tne contraction of the earth’s center corresponds to a cooling of about three hundred degrees. According to this calculation, at least one hundred millions of years, and at most two thousand millions of years, must have passed, since the water condensed on the surface of the solid crust.