Timeline of geology: see also geologic timescale.

• 1620 - Francis Bacon notices the jigsaw fit of the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean
• 1701 - Edmund Halley suggests using the salinity and evaporation of the Mediterranean to determine the age of the Earth
• 1785 - James Hutton presents paper entitled Theory of the Earth - earth must be old
• 1830 - Sir Charles Lyell publishes book, Principles of Geology
• 1837 - Louis Agassiz begins his glaciation studies which eventually demonstrate that the Earth has had at least one Ice Age
• 1862 - Lord Kelvin attempts to find the age of the Earth by examining its cooling time and estimates that the Earth is between 20--400 million years old
• 1903 - George Darwin[?] and John Joly claim that radioactivity is partially responsible for the Earth's heat
• 1907 - Bertram Boltwood[?] proposes that the amount of lead in uranium and thorium ores might be used to determine the Earth's age and crudely dates some rocks to have ages between 410--2200 million years
• 1912 - Alfred Wegener proposes that all the continents once formed a single landmass called Pangaea that broke apart via continental drift
• 1913 - Albert Michelson measures tides in the solid body of the Earth
• 1935 - Charles Richter[?] invents a logarithmic scale to measure the intensity of earthquakes
• 1953 - Maurice Ewing[?] and Bruce Heezen[?] discover the Great Global Rift[?] running along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
• 1960 - Harry Hess[?] proposes that new sea floor might be created at mid-ocean rifts and destroyed at deep sea trenches
• 1963 - F.J. Vine[?] and D.H. Matthews[?] explain the stripes of magnetized rocks with alternating magnetic polarities running parallel to mid- ocean ridges as due to sea floor spreading and the periodic geomagnetic field reversals