A geologist carefully maps the layers of soil in which ancient flint tools have been found. Exact correlation of the tool-bearing strata with material datable by carbon-14 analysis must be accomplished before the age of the tools can be determined.
Even this process wasn’t entirely without problems. The difficulty lay in the fact that ordinary sedimentary rocks (shale, sandstone, and limestone) cannot be dated by the usual nuclear methods because they present no suitable closed systems. Only some volcanic sediments can be reliably dated by the mica, feldspar, and zircon they contain; but these ancient ashfalls are rare, usually are only a few inches thick, and are not easy to identify at the surface because they weather quickly to clay. Only about a dozen volcanic beds have been accurately dated in North America. The time points they established are mainstays of the present geologic time scale, but they have had to be supplemented by indirect information.
Steeply dipping sandstone strata from the Cretaceous Period near Gallup, New Mexico. This photo, taken in 1901 (note the horse-drawn wagon), was made on an early government survey of Western lands.
Fossils of bird tracks in sandstone in Death Valley, California.
The most important of these indirect time points are furnished by what geologists call [BRACKETED INTRUSIVES]. It often happens in geologic history that a mass of rock becomes molten at a great depth and forces its way up through several layers of sedimentary rocks. The sedimentary layers are usually bent and twisted (folded) by the upthrust, and where the cooler rock comes in contact with the molten mass, cooler material is burned (recrystallized). Geologists call that process [CONTACT METAMORPHISM] because the sedimentary rock forms are changed, or metamorphosed, to have another form or composition. Contact-metamorphosed rocks, in spite of the damage they have suffered, may contain recognizable and accurately datable fossils. Thereby the metamorphic rock establishes a lower limit for the age of the intrusion: It must be younger than the fossils in the youngest of the metamorphic rocks it touched.
Now on top of the intrusive rock, we may find another sedimentary rock, deposited on top of the intrusive after it cooled and was exposed by the erosion of overlying materials, perhaps millions of years later. This new sediment may also contain fossils and thus furnish an upper limit for the age of the intrusion. The measured age of the intrusive rock thus can be used to set upper and lower limits on the absolute ages of the two sediments. If we are lucky, the two sediments will bracket a relatively short interval, making our measurement quite precise.
