Astronomical dating in the 19th century

Today astronomical tuning is widely accepted as numerical dating method after having revolutionised the age calibration of the geological archive and time scale over the last decades. However, its origin is not well known and tracing its roots is important especially from a science historic perspective. Astronomical tuning developed in consequence of the astronomical theory of the ice ages and was repeatedly used in the second half of the 19th century before the invention of radio-isotopic dating. Building upon earlier ideas of Joseph Adhemar. James Croll started to formulate his astronomical theory of the ice ages in 1864 according to which precession controlled ice ages occur alternatingly on both hemispheres at times of maximum eccentricity of the Earth's orbit. The publication of these ideas compelled Charles Lyell to revise his Principles of Geology and add Croll's theory, thus providing an alternative to his own geographical cause of the ice ages. Both Croll and Lyell initially tuned the last glacial epoch to the prominent eccentricity maximum 850,000yr ago. This age was used as starting point by Lyell to calculate an age of 240 million years for the beginning of the Cambrium. But Croll soon revised the tuning to a much younger less prominent eccentricity maximum between 240,000 and 80,000yr ago. In addition he tuned older glacial deposits of late Miocene and Eocene ages to eccentricity maxima around 800,000 and 2,800,000yr ago. Archibald and James Geikie were the first to recognize interglacials during the last glacial epoch, as predicted by Croll's theory, and attempted to tune them to precession. Soon after Frank Taylor linked a series of 15 end-moraines left behind by the retreating ice sheet to precession to arrive at a possible age of 300,000yr for the maximum glaciation. In a classic paper, Axel Blytt (1876) explained the scattered distribution of plant groups in Norway to precession induced alternating rainy and dry periods as recorded by the layering in Holocene peat bogs. He specifically linked the exceptionally wet Atlantic period to the prolonged precession minimum at 33,300yr ago and further related basic stratigraphic alternations to precession induced climate change in general. Such a linkage was also proposed by Grove Karl Gilbert for cyclic alternations in the marine Cretaceous of North America. Extrapolating sedimentation rates, he arrived at an astronomical duration for part of the Cretaceous that was roughly as long as the final estimate of William Thomson for the age of the Earth. Assuming that orbital parameters directly affect sea level, Karl Mayer-Eymar and Blytt correlated the well known succession of Tertiary stages to precession and eccentricity, respectively. Remarkably, Blytt, like Croll before him, used very long-period cycles in eccentricity to establish and validate his tuning. Understandably these studies in the second half of the 19th century were largely deductive in nature and proved partly incorrect later. Nevertheless, this fascinating period marks a crucial phase in the development of the astronomical theory of the ice ages and climate, and in astronomical dating. It preceded the final inductive phase, which started with the recovery of deep-sea cores in 1947 and led to a spectacular revival of the astronomical theory, by a century. The first half of the 20th century can best be regarded as an intermediate phase, despite the significant progress made in both theoretical aspects and tuning. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.