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%).
Catastrophism did not die out immediately, although by the late 1830s only a few catastrophists remained, and they believed Noahâs flood was geologically insignificant. By the end of the 19th century, the age of the earth was considered by all geologists to be in the hundreds of millions of years. Radiometric dating methods began to be developed in 1903, and over the course of the 20th century that age of the earth expanded to 4.5 billion years.