Nature tracks the passage of time. Trees form yearly rings on their trunks, we can determine the age of the tree by counting its rings. The oldest living trees on earth are said to be the six-thousand-year-old bristlecone pines found in the Sierra Nevada. The dead trees lying beside them are said to be almost twice as old. Similarly, lakebeds are said to accumulate sediments with seasonal variations: minerals in spring, pollen and plant material in summer and fall. This creates distinguishable annual layers on the bottom of lakes that can be counted, just like counting tree rings. Scientists have found lakebeds with layers as old as thirty-five-thousand years.
Seasonal ice rings in glaciers provide another example. Ice rings form through the accumulation of years of falling snow, and seasonal differences can be distinguished---such as increased dust and larger ice crystals in summer---that allow the age to be determined. Scientists have drilled ice cores deep into the glaciers and found ice that is 123,000 years old in Greenland and as old as 740,000 years in Antarctica.
Such dating methods are straightforward. Pull a cylindrical plug from a glacier and count the layers. The clarity is one of the reasons scientists react negatively to claims that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. They consider that an ice core with 500,000 seasonal summer layers of pollen can no more be ten thousand years old than a massive oak with two hundred annual rings can be two years old.
Some weeks back you asked why what we believe concerning the age of the universe matters: In the January 2010 issue of Smithsonian magazine there is an article about the Dead Sea scrolls. The article says the thousands of tourists who flock to Qumran each year, where the scrolls were discovered, are told the site was once home to a Jewish sect called the Essences, who devoted their lives to writing and preserving sacred texts. An Israeli archaeologist disagrees, and says the settlement was originally a small fort that was later converted into a pottery factory to serve nearby towns. Which story sounds better to the tourists? Do they want to know the truth or do they want to continue to believe what they want to believe even if it might be false? Do we?
Consider the history of the United States. Do you want to know how things really were or are you comfortable with someone's story?
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"It is, in the end, cheaper to feed the whole flock for a year than to fight them for a week."
---1850 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs
"If the tale of the poor wretches...could be impartially related, it would exhibit a picture of cruelty, injustice, and horror scarcely surpassed by that of the Peruvians in the time of Pizarro."
---1852 Gen. E. D. Townsend in his California Diary of the Indians facing pressure from the 1849 gold rush
