Posted for Rex Dalton

A US project to more precisely chart geological time scales is releasing a new initiative to educate students on deep time in order to challenge religious groups who argue life was divinely made about 10,000 years ago.

Earthtime’s program – downloadable at earth-time.org and available in DVD and CD format – explains the ages back billions of years. It includes teaching methods in math and physics to explain how researchers date sediments through atomic decay.

Sam Bowring, a geochronologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and an Earthtime leader, described the educational drive last week to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

“I will never forget Kirk Johnson of the Denver Museum of Science and Technology leaning into the camera, saying: ‘Go home and tell your parents the world is 4.567 billion years old’,” says Bowring.

In Denver, Colorado, and Boston, Massachusetts, Earthtime scientists have provided educational material to a total of hundreds of students and teachers. Denver scientists also conduct dialogues with students over district video networks.

In a planned next grant from the US National Science Foundation that previously has funded Earthtime with $1 million, scientists hope to expand the educational outreach.

One major Earthtime science project is to precisely date the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary about 65 million years ago, when most life forms were wiped out by a worldwide catastrophic event. Bowring, Johnson and other researchers are using sediments of the K-T boundary debris outside Denver for the more exact date.