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 Earth is very old. But how old, exactly? And how can we know with any degree of confidence? As Henry Reich describes in the video above, the process of scientifically estimating the age of the Earth revolves around, essentially, finding the oldest piece of the planet we can, then figuring out how old that piece is.