'Timefulness' by Marcia Bjornerud is an excellent general review of how the work of geologist specialists of all kinds and from the observations of proto-scientists in earlier centuries to now, geologists have been able to determine the age of the Earth and its history. The book describes the history of the original formation of the Earth and its various atmospheric gas changes (well, at least from the eras after the Earth's first birthday of a few billion years old) to current times. By examining rocks, studying their composition and deterioration, and what has been trapped inside them, they have figured out what happened to the Earth during its lifetime. The book fills in those blanks regarding laboratory and mathematical processes that many general-reader science articles and TV shows skip over.

I copied the cover blurb below as it is accurate:

"Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth's atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. But spans of hundreds of years--the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere--approach the limits of our comprehension. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.

Marcia Bjornerud shows how geologists chart the planet's past, explaining how we can determine the pace of solid Earth processes such as mountain building and erosion and comparing them with the more unstable rhythms of the oceans and atmosphere. These overlapping rates of change in the Earth system--some fast, some slow--demand a poly-temporal worldview, one that Bjornerud calls "timefulness." She explains why timefulness is vital in the Anthropocene, this human epoch of accelerating planetary change, and proposes sensible solutions for building a more time-literate society.

This compelling book presents a new way of thinking about our place in time, enabling us to make decisions on multigenerational timescales. The lifespan of Earth may seem unfathomable compared to the brevity of human existence, but this view of time denies our deep roots in Earth's history--and the magnitude of our effects on the planet."

FYI: the end of the Earth will probably happen in about 1.5 billion years. The sun will kill it by expanding, so. We should start clearing up the pesky engineering problems preventing us from building those proposed generational ships.

The chapters are:

-A Call for Timefulness
-An Atlas of Time
-The Pace of the Earth
-Changes in the Air
-Great Accelerations
-Timefulness, Utopian and Scientific
-Epilogue


The pictures in this Wikipedia article are very helpful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale


There are wonderfully informative appendixes in the back:

-Simplified Geologic Timescale
-Durations and Rates of Earth Phenomena
-Environmental Crises in Earth's History: Causes and Consequences


Plus, an extensive Notes and Index sections.


Religious people will file all of these facts under Fantasy fiction no matter what proofs are shown in this book and other science books. For most of the rest of us, it's confirmed and reproducible science from centuries of observations and hard exploratory work by thousands of scientists and students. For conservative but mostly sane Republicans, dictators, oligarchs and other capitalists, it's information filed under "who cares" unless the geologists have discovered a pocket of oil or a rare mineral.

The author Marcia Bjornerud is a professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University.