The Blue Amber Blog

Geologists are Amazing

They know hundreds of words for different sorts of dirt and hundreds of words for things it does when left alone for a few million eons. And geologists and Ted Turner have one thing in common: they love to toss those millions around as if they were pennies.

Well, they have to. By the 1800s “Uhm” and “cough-cough” and “it’s a mystery” and “6,000” no longer sounded plausible as answers to the age of the world. So geologists began throwing out numbers so preposterously large, they just had to be correct. And since then rock hunters have figured that millions are so very cool and have adapted their own finds and theories to fit that time frame.

But how old is Dominican amber, really? Can we take the geological numbers for granite? Where do these preposterous numbers even come from?

Do we even know its age?

If someone wishes to push the point, then no we don’t, not for certain. It’s all Guessing.

But in all fairness, it’s very Educated Guessing.

There’s a difference.

So how old is amber really?

Submitted for your approval, here are a few articles on the most common amber dating techniques guiding our contemporary estimates. If you have time to browse a few, please feel free to do so — if not, you may skip right to the end of this article and take our word for it.

Geologists Have Faults Too

It is sad really, but we have yet much to learn before we can fully understand earth’s aging process. There are of course about 40+ dating techniques, yet those that can be applied to Dominican amber are still ambiguous at best and suggestive at worst.

The conclusion is that practically every dating technique has its ups and downs and its valid points; every age can in some way be argued as correct. None are superior to the other and it’s only the combination of all of them that give us an Educated Guess.

Geology (also known as the School of Rock) has the (nasty?) habit of hammering dating-results into its preconceived geological time frame. Sarcastic as I try to be, there is little reason to presently doubt this time-frame (far-fetched it may sound at times). The numbers suggested range anywhere between 100 million to as young as 10 million, but the most commonly agreed upon number for Dominican Amber is pegged at 20 - 30 million, critiques notwithstanding.

More or less. Approximately. Sort of.

You get the picture. The true answer for the age of amber remains as elusive now as it did at the beginning of this article, only more so.

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A few Citations:

• Manuel A. Iturralde-Vennet 2001. Geology of the Amber-Bearing Deposits of the Greater Antilles. Caribbean Journal of Science, Vol. 00, No. 0, 141-167, 2001

• Jackman, T.R., Larson, A., de Queiroz, K., and Losos, J.B. 1999. Phylogenetic relationships and tempo of early diversification in Anolis lizards. Systematic Biology, 48:254-285.

• Roughgarden, L. 1995. Anolis lizards of the Caribbean: ecology, evolution, and plate tectonics. Oxford University Press.

  Martin, G.E; Zekter, A.S., Two-Dimensional NMR Methods for Establishing Molecular Connectivity; VCH Publishers, Inc: New York, 1988 (p.59)

• C. Tuniz, J.R Bird, D.Fink, and G.F Herzog. 1998. Accelerator Mass Spectrometry: Ultrasensitive analysis for global science. CRC Press.

• Badash, Lawrence. 1968, “The origin of radioactive dating techniques” Am. Philos. Soc. Proc. 112(3), pp.158-169.

• Joseph P. Hornak, Ph.D. “The basics of NMR” 1997-2004 http://www.cis.rit.edu/htbooks/nmr/