How did we discover the Earth is billions of years old?

Human intuition struggles to grasp timescales spanning billions of years. This video explores the recent scientific breakthrough of deep time, explaining how early attempts to measure the age of our planet revealed a history far more vast and humbling than previously imagined.

The concept of deep time is a relatively modern discovery, emerging alongside our realization of the universe's immense spatial scale. While astronomers frequently discuss billions of years as a standard unit of measurement, these timescales remain fundamentally outside the scope of human experience.

The realization came as scientists began rigorous efforts to determine the Earth's age. The resulting findings were both shocking and humbling, fundamentally shifting our understanding of our place in history and the duration of the natural world.

Source: How We Know The Earth Is Ancient