When this happens gasses dissolved in the magma are able to come out of solution, forming gas bubbles (the cavities) inside it. When the magma finally reaches the surface as lava and cools, the rock solidifies around the gas bubbles and traps them inside, preserving them as holes filled with gas called vesicles.
He took them to the Argonne National Laboratory, where he was granted time on a late-model mass spectrometer. In a meeting in Wisconsin soon afterward, Patterson revealed the results of his study. The definitive age of the Earth is 4.550 billion years (give or take 70 million years). The current estimate for the age of the earth is 4.54 Â± 0.05 billion years (4.54 Ã 109 years Â± 1%).
The pregeologic period. From the point at which the planet first began to form, the history of Earth spans approximately 4.6 billion years. The oldest known rocksâthe faux amphibolites of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt in Quebec, Canadaâhowever, have an isotopic age of 4.28 billion years.