Contents

## **Preface XI**


Masayasu Miyake, Tsuneari Ishimaru and Koji Umeda

	- Ken Munyikwa

#### **Data (on Rock-Forming and Sulphide Minerals), Duration and Mineralization 143**

T. Bayanova, F. Mitrofanov, P. Serov, L. Nerovich, N. Yekimova, E. Nitkina and I. Kamensky

Preface

tory.

track, chlorine-36, luminescence.

**"There is no history without a chronology"** , the white rabbit in Alice in Wonder‐ land is supposed to have said. And, indeed, this is a very wise saying. Chronology is the time ordering by which events get a position in time so that an evolutionary

The successive growth of a crystal, a speleothem or a coral implies the successive adding of time slices. When dated, we get a chronological order of the growth his‐

The adding of sediments implies the successive building up of a stratigraphy where each individual time slice represents a point in the growing history over time. By comparison with modern processes, one might obtain a rough time esti‐ mate of how much is required for the formation of a certain time unit. And this was the first geochronological method; i.e. the wish of decoding the age hidden in various sedimentary units. Charles Lyell is usually considered to be the "father of stratigraphy". The study of stratigraphy is the core of the geological science. Al‐ ready in the late 19th century, it was estimated that the base of the Cambrian Era and the onset of shell-bearing fossils must have an age in the order of 500 million years, an age arrived at by adding up estimated of the time of deposition of the sequence of stratigraphic units from the present back to the base of the Cambrian.

The application radiometric dating methods started in 1907 [1] and has gone through a remarkable evolution throughout the 20th century. In radiometric dating, the radioactive decay and transformation of one nuclide (i.e. isotope of a particular element) into another nuclide is used to establish absolute age determinations. By now there are several different methods; e.g. uranium-led, samarium-neodymium, potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, uranium-thorium, radiocarbon, fission

history becomes recordable in memory, picture or writing.
