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How do you use cross-cutting relations in relative dating?

Cross-Cutting Relations

Here's another of those relative dating tips that seems obvious to us in our modern sophistication, but which was pretty clever when it was originally developed:

if you have layers of rock which are cut by something - a fault, say, or basalt dike - then the rock layers are obviously older than the fault or dike which cuts them. That's called the Principle of Cross-Cutting Relations.

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