This suggests that there may have been an immense span of time, perhaps eons, between the creation of matter and life, and the beginning of the day-night cycle.

Less than a century after Johnson, the geologist Sir Charles Lyell showed that today's Earth could have been sculpted by everyday erosion, earthquakes, and volcanoes acting in the past over immense spans of time.

This emblem had been the joint gift of the mining companies, and the immense span of the crosspiece, at least five or six feet, carried its freight of precious stones like the boughs of the crystallized trees in the forest.

Possibly, triangulated roof trusses were built, this being the only conceivable way of constructing the immense spans achieved, the longest exceeding 30 metres (see List of ancient roofs).

Scarcely a foot of space was unoccupied; from the very edge of the ceiling to the orchestral platform in the centre, around the immense span of the building, there was but one dense mass of heads.

She wondered if Malenfant could have survived, in one form or another, even over such an immense span of space and time.

"To see a living thing across such immense spans of time."

The immense span of her triple rig filled the sky with flashing light.

My sense of a prehistoric world, of immense spans of time, was first stimulated by ferns and fossil ferns.

The geological evolution of our planet has proceeded according to uniform, gradual processes over an immense span of time.