Are folks at the University of Bristol intentionally trying to annoy me? In the very same week that I write about the abundant signs of old age in the rock record, they put out a press release which states:

By the end of the 19th century, many geologists still believed the age of the Earth to be a few thousand years old, as indicated by the Bible, while others considered it to be around 100 million years old, in line with calculations made by Lord Kelvin, the most prestigious physicist of his day.

The press release is advertising a talk by Cherry Lewis, who has authored a biography of radiometric dating pioneer Arthur Holmes, so this statement is presumably intended to emphasise the importance of his contribution to establishing the age of the Earth. However, the part in bold is, quite simply, wrong. It might be an accurate statement of the situation at the end of the 18th century (in as much as geology actually existed as a discrete discipline back then), although even that post-dates James Hutton proposing a world which had “no vestige of a beginning – and no prospect of an end”. But by the late 1800s pretty much every geologist worth his salt had recognised that the stuff above the rocks – glacial, beach and flood plain deposits – represented at least a few thousand years, and that the rocks themselves represented a vastly longer timespan – not thousands, but millions of years.

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