T Rex And The Crater Of Doom Ebooking
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:3 C H A P T E R Gradualist versus Catastrophist BIBLICAL CHRONOLOGY AND CATASTROPHISM In previous centuries, travelers crossing the Alps on primitive trails faced drowning in wild rivers, freezing in blizzards, or burial by avalanches. As grim obstacles, slashed through by dark canyons and capped by a wilderness of glacial ice, mountains must often have seemed threatening in the past. When scientists began to turn their attention to what we now call geology, an obvious question was how mountains like the Alps came to be. We now see that the answer to this question depended on how much time was available for their creation.
T Rex And The Crater Of Doom Ebooking Online
Mountains could form slowly and gradually if there was lots of time in Earth history. However, the early geologists automatically assumed a brief history, because the Bible actually lists the generations of our forefathers back to the creation of the Earth, and the Bible was accepted as an accurate account of history. On this basis, James Ussher, an Anglo-Irish bishop (1581–1656), determined that the Earth had been created in 4004 B.C. With so little time available for its formation, a mountain range like the Alps could only be seen as the wreckage from a catastrophe, and perhaps this view resonated with the gloom that travelers evidently felt while crossing mountain barriers. As long as the biblical chronology was accepted, people who thought about the history recorded in rocks and landscapes had to conclude that changes in the Earth’s past had been very rapid.
This viewpoint came to be called catastrophism. Geology could not become a real science until the stranglehold of Biblical chronology was broken.
Geologists have long C H A P T E R T H R E E 44 attributed this breakthrough to two scientific heroes. The first of these was the eighteenth-century Scotsman, James Hutton, who is credited with the discovery that the Earth is enormously ancient. The other was the nineteenth-century Englishman, Charles Lyell, recognized as the father of “uniformitarianism”— the view that all changes in Earth history have been gradual. Although these traditional accounts are now recognized as oversimplified and misleading,1 they were accepted until recently by most geologists and paleontologists. TO MAP THE PLANET Hutton’s ancient Earth and Lyell’s uniformitarianism gave geologists the tools they needed to approach their central scientific problem—to understand rocks and landscapes. Long-familiar mountains like the Alps and dramatic, newly discovered landscapes like the Grand Canyon no longer required catastrophic explanations. Slow deformation and slow erosion over very long periods of time better explained what geologists saw in the field.
John Muir poetically but correctly attributed the vertical walls of Yosemite to the slow grinding of glaciers, rather than to violence and catastrophe: “Nature chose for a tool not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea.”2 The concept of an ancient Earth made it possible to understand rocks and landscapes correctly, but it raised a new problem. Geologic processes, active through the 4,600 million years of Earth history, have produced an enormously complex and varied array of rocks. Those rocks, constituting the historical record of the Earth, are to be found all around the globe—in farmlands, deserts, mountains, jungles, and under the sea. Describing all those rocks and interpreting all that history would be a formidable task. It would take generations of geologists to G R A D U A L I S T V E R S U S C A T A S T R O P H I S T 45 complete. And so, beginning in the nineteenth century, geologists settled down to do what was clearly a necessary task—to measure and describe the rocks of the entire surface of the world and to plot their distribution on detailed maps that would be the basis for understanding Earth history. Constructing an accurate geologic map of an area, showing the locations of all the different kinds of rocks and their geometrical relationships, is a challenging and rewarding task, and geologists became very skilled at mapping.
T Rex And The Crater Of Doom Ebooking Free
I’ve made several geologic maps at a variety of scales, and I take pride and pleasure in them. As the decades went by, systematic geologic mapping paid off in a more and more detailed knowledge of the history of the Earth, region by region.