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Keeping Time with Zircons (knowablemagazine.org)
21 points by bryanrasmussen on April 25, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


It's hard to keep in mind just how many atoms there are even in something that is only a gram. Even if the impurities are 1 in 10^15, if you have 10^21 atoms, you'll have a million atoms of the impurity. Detection gets better and better as time goes on, we're going to keep learning a lot of interesting things.


Another cool zircon time keeper is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_track_dating




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