Defining a Broad Date Range

The standard valid date range is 01/01/100 through to 31/12/9999. STEMgis includes a method of defining years outside of this range which is important when looking at archaeological or geological dates. Any date with the range 01/01/6000 through to 31/12/7999 is used to calculate an alternative date using the following method:

The number of seconds before midnight between 31/12/6999 and 01/01/7000 is used to define the number of years before the year zero. The number of seconds after this midnight is used to calculate the number of years after the year zero. For example, the date/time 01/01/7000 12:12:12 equates to the year 43932 AD while the date/time 31/12/6999 16:16:16 equates to the year 27824 BC.

These dates between 01/01/6000 and 31/12/7999 can be used within CSV files to load any dates between 31,536,000,000 BC and 31,536,000,000 AD.