We're in the Hall Planet Earth, and I'm

standing
in front of one of my favorite samples
from the
Stillwater Complex in Montana, and it's
one of my
favorite samples because I've actually
done research on this rock.
What I want to do with it is to
illustrate how we can date rocks by
radiometric techniques.
Now geologists for more than 200 years
have known the earth is very old.
They've made observations
of relatively simple things such as
unconformities such
as folded rocks, such as eroding mountains
and realized the
earth has to, has to be not thousands of
years, but millions of years old, and
perhaps greater.
But they never knew how old the Earth
really was, or how long basically geologic
processes require.
But since the advent of radiometric dating
we have been able to answer those
questions, and we've been able to
determine
precisely and quantitatively the ages of
rocks.
So now in the case of the stillwater water
complex, the stillwater water is a
fossil magma chamber, if you will, its
a solidified magma chamber, it solidified
about 2.
7 Billion years ago, and it crops out
right
now in the bear tooth range in
southwestern Montana.
So this rock is known as a Gabro, a Gabro
is a
rock that contains the white minerals
plagioclase, green minerals which are
clinopyroxene.
And brown minerals which are,
orthopyroxene.
Now the question is how are we going to go
about dating this rock, and I'm going to
explain to you a method known as
samarium-neodymium, dating.
Well, first of all you have to
prepare the rock.
So we take a sample of this rock, and we
crush it up.
and then we separate out the different
minerals,
so, and we've got them in vials right
here.
So, this vial of white minerals is a vial
of the plagioclase.
The second vial is a vial of just the
whole rock, the bulk rock.
In other words, not separating the
minerals.
This next vial is the vial of, full of
clinopyroxene.
So again, these are very, very pure
mineral separates.
And this fourth vial is a vial of
orthopyroxene.
So we're going to analyze these four
sub-samples to determine age.
So now I'd like to explain this method of
dating using samarium and neodymium.
And the things that you have to know about
samarium neodymium are first of all that
they're rare earths.
they're one of a
group of elements known as rare earth
elements that are trace elements.
but exist in almost everything, so they're
rather common, and they're
in concentrations that are easily measured
by any number of techniques.
the second thing you need to know, is
that samarium, the isotope samarium 147 is
radioactive.
A samarium 147
decays to neodynium 143.
With a half-life of 1.06 times 10 to the
11 years.
Which is a lot of years, and I'm sure you
can figure out how many billions of years
that is.
The other thing to realize is that there
are a number
of isotopes of neodymium, the stable
isotope of neodymium is neodymium 144.
There's one more thing that's really
important to understand.
When plagioclase, clinopyroxene
and orthopyroxene all crystallize from
this liquid.
They all start with the same ratio of
neodymium 143 to neodymium 144.
Okay.
But they'll have different ratios of
samarium 147.
To neodymium 144, 143.
So, now what we can do is plot the
two ratios that I just mentioned against
each other.
So here's a plot, the ratio of neodymium
143 divided by neodymium 144,
against samarium 147 divided by neodymium
144.
Now initially, the three different
minerals, remember they all started
out life with the same neodymium 143 to
144 ratio.
But they have different samarium to
neodymium ratios.
So they start out as a straight line here.
So this is plagioclase, this is
clinopyroxene, and this is orthopyroxene.
So with time, the samarium decays away.
This ratio, samarium 147 to neodymium 144,
decreases,
and the ratio of neodymium 143 to
Neodymium 144 increases.
And again, the slope of that line is
proportional to the
age, and that allows us to calculate the
age very precisely.
Again, the age of this rock turns out to
be
approximately 2.7 billion years old, and
we know it very precisely.