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LiveScience
LiveScience
Ethan Freedman

How do we know how old Earth is?

A detailed image of planet Earth created from photographs taken by Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on board the new Suomi NPP satellite. Here we can see North America.

Earth is roughly 4.54 billion years old. In that time, it has seen continents form and disappear, ice caps expand and retreat, and life evolve from single-celled organisms into blue whales.

But how do we know Earth's age? We start by looking inside it.

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