GEOLOGIC TIME

The expression geologic time refers to the vast span from Earth's beginnings to the present, about 4.6 billion years. To examine the history of Earth, one must discard most familiar ideas about time. Instead of thinking in terms of years, centuries, or even millennia, the most basic unit is a million years, and even that is rather small when compared with the four eons into which geologic time is divided. Earth scientists' knowledge of the first three eons is fairly limited. What they do know comes from a combination of absolute dating, mostly by the study of radioactive decay, and relative dating through the stratigraphic record of rock layers.