Geologists often need to know the age of material that they find. They use absolute dating methods, sometimes called numerical dating, to give rocks an actual date, or date range, in numbers of years. This is different to relative dating, which only puts geological events in time order.

How the relative and absolute dating are used to determine the ages of rocks?

​There are two main ways to determine the age of a rock, these are Relative dating and Absolute dating. Relative dating is used to determine the relative order of past events by comparing the age of one object to another. Cross dating is a method of using fossils to determine the relative age of a rock.

What is difference between an absolute date and a relative date?

Explanation: Absolute dating(also known as radiometric dating) is based by the measurement of the content of specific radioactive isotopes of which the half time is known. Relative dating instead allows for identifying the sequential order of geological events one relative to the other.