Based on three centuries of direct measurement, the Earth’s magnetic field is known to be varying slowly in both its intensity and direction. In fact, change seems to have been the rule throughout all of the Earth’s past. Magnetic minerals in rocks (and in articles of fired clay) provide the record of ancient change, for they took on the magnetic field existing at the time of their creation or emplacement.

Polar reversals were originally discovered in lava rocks and since have been noted in deep-sea cores. In both cases the time dimension is added through radiometric methods applied to the same materials that show the reversals. Potassium–argon is the commonest chronometer used. A magnetic-polarity (or paleomagnetic) time scale has been proposed along the line of the geologic time scale; time divisions are called intervals, or epochs.

Tree-ring growth

In the early 1900s an American astronomer named Andrew E. Douglass went looking for terrestrial records of past sunspot cycles and not only found what he sought but also discovered a useful dating method in the process. The focus of his attention was the growth rings in trees—living trees, dead trees, beams in ancient structures, and even large lumps of charcoal.

The key documents for tree-ring dating, or dendrochronology, are those trees that grow or grew where roots receive water in direct proportion to precipitation. Under such a situation, the annual tree rings vary in width as a direct reflection of the moisture supplied. What is important in tree-ring dating is the sequence in which rings vary. Suppose, for example, that a 100-year-old tree is cut down and its ring widths are measured. The results can be expressed graphically, and, if a similar graph were made from a small stump found near the 100-year-old tree, the two graphs could be compared until a match of the curves was obtained. The time when the small stump was made would thereby be determined from the position of its outer ring alongside the 100-year record.

Not every tree species nor even every specimen of a suitable species can be used. In the American Southwest, success has been achieved with yellow pine, Douglas fir, and even sagebrush. Unfortunately, the giant sequoia of California does not live in a sufficiently sensitive environment to provide a useful record. The even older bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains does have a climate-sensitive record, but its area of growth is so limited and so inaccessible that no bristlecone specimens have so far appeared in archaeological sites. This shortcoming notwithstanding, dead bristlecone pine trees are presently providing rings as old as 8,200 years for dating by carbon-14. The purpose is to check the carbon-14 method.

Coral growth

Certain fossil corals have long been used to date rocks relatively, but only recently has it been shown that corals may also serve as absolute geochronometers. They may do so by preserving a record of how many days there were in a year at the time they were growing. The number of days per year has decreased through time because the rate of rotation of the Earth has decreased; geophysical evidence suggests that days are currently lengthening at the rate of 20 seconds per million years. If this were typical of the slowdown during the past, a year consisted of 423 days about 600 million years ago.

It is thought that horn corals indicate the number of days per year by means of their exceedingly fine external ridges of calcium carbonate, each of which is believed to represent a day’s growth. Several hundred of the fine ridges also seem to cluster as a unit that presumably corresponds to one year. In certain modern West Indian corals the number of fine ridges in a presumed annual increment is approximately 360, suggesting that coral patterns are being properly interpreted.

Not many fossil corals are in a state of preservation that permits the counting of ridges, but those that are seem to lend themselves well to this procedure. Several Middle Devonian corals indicate between 385 and 410 ridges, with an average of about 400. It remains to be seen whether this method of dating, so elegant in concept and so simple in application, will blossom or wither away in the years to come.