In 1911, British geologist Arthur Holmes (1890–1965) began to formulate a geologic time scale based on absolute time, using the uranium-lead dating method to determine the age of rocks. In 1913, he published The Age of Earth, in which he outlined how radioactive decay methods, in conjunction with geological data, could be used to construct an absolute geologic time scale. In 1927, Holmes estimated that the age of Earth’s crust, based on his radiometric techniques, is approximately 3.6 billion years old.