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I find the use of zircons in this context very interesting. Starting with the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon https://en.m.wikipedia.

I find the use of zircons in this context very interesting. Starting with the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon I went down the rabbit hole and learned a bit about Geochronology: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geochronology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geochronology It is interesting how they “break up” dating depending on the time frame, for example some dating is only measured by “eon” (half a billion years), whereas the “finest” measurement seems to be “age” which corresponds to single digit millions of years. A bit humbling to think that all of humanity can “fit” in the smallest geological measure of time.

cbkeller 8y ago
Yeah, I think the vastness of geologic time has been aptly described as "geology’s signal contribution to human thought" -- the same way astronomy showed us we weren't the literal center of the universe. I think about Myr and Gyr timescales every day at work, but it's still hard to really intuitively grasp. Obligatory John McPhee: > Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination. > Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.