For the idea that Earth-like planets have been affected in the past by short-lived, violent galaxy-wide events, see
Neocatastrophism
.
Geological theory of abrupt, severe change
In
geology
,
catastrophism
is the theory that the
Earth
has largely been shaped by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope.
[1]
This contrasts with
uniformitarianism
(sometimes called
gradualism
), according to which slow incremental changes, such as
erosion
, brought about all the Earth's
geological
features. The proponents of uniformitarianism held that the present was "the key to the past", and that all geological processes (such as
erosion
) throughout the past resembled those that can be observed today. Since the 19th-century disputes between catastrophists and uniformitarians, a more inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed, in which the
scientific consensus
accepts that some catastrophic events occurred in the geologic past, but regards these as explicable as extreme examples of natural processes which can occur.
Proponents of catastrophism proposed that each
geological epoch
ended with violent and sudden natural catastrophes such as major
floods
and the rapid
formation of major mountain chains
. Plants and animals living in the parts of the world where such events occurred
became extinct
, to be replaced abruptly by the new forms whose fossils defined the geological strata. Some catastrophists attempted to relate at least one such change to the
Biblical
account of
Noah's flood
.
The French scientist
Georges Cuvier
(1769?1832) popularised the concept of catastrophism in the early 19th century; he proposed that new life-forms had moved in from other areas after local floods, and avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.
[2]
[3]
History
[
edit
]
Geology and biblical beliefs
[
edit
]
In the early development of
geology
, efforts were made in a predominantly
Christian
western society to reconcile biblical narratives of
Creation
and the
universal flood
with new concepts about the processes which had formed the Earth. The discovery of other ancient flood myths was taken as explaining why the flood story was "stated in scientific methods with surprising frequency among the
Greeks
", an example being
Plutarch
's account of the
Ogygian flood
.
[4]
Cuvier and the natural theologians
[
edit
]
The leading scientific proponent of catastrophism in the early nineteenth century was the French
anatomist
and
paleontologist
Georges Cuvier
. His motivation was to explain the patterns of
extinction
and
faunal succession
that he and others were observing in the
fossil
record. While he did speculate that the catastrophe responsible for the most recent extinctions in Eurasia might have been the result of the inundation of low-lying areas by the sea, he did not make any reference to
Noah's flood
.
[2]
Nor did he ever make any reference to divine creation as the mechanism by which repopulation occurred following the extinction event. In fact Cuvier, influenced by the ideas of the
Enlightenment
and the intellectual climate of the
French Revolution
, avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.
[3]
Cuvier also believed that the
stratigraphic
record indicated that there had been several of these revolutions, which he viewed as recurring natural events, amid long intervals of stability during the history of life on Earth. This led him to believe the Earth was several million years old.
[5]
By contrast in Britain, where
natural theology
was influential during the early nineteenth century, a group of geologists including
William Buckland
and
Robert Jameson
interpreted Cuvier's work differently. Cuvier had written an introduction to a collection of his papers on fossil quadrupeds, discussing his ideas on catastrophic extinction. Jameson translated Cuvier's introduction into English, publishing it under the title
Theory of the Earth
. He added extensive editorial notes to the translation, explicitly linking the latest of Cuvier's revolutions with the biblical flood. The resulting essay was extremely influential in the English-speaking world.
[6]
Buckland spent much of his early career trying to demonstrate the reality of the biblical flood using geological evidence. He frequently cited Cuvier's work, even though Cuvier had proposed an inundation of limited geographic extent and extended duration, whereas Buckland, to be consistent with the biblical account, was advocating a universal flood of short duration.
[7]
Eventually, Buckland abandoned
flood geology
in favor of the
glaciation
theory advocated by
Louis Agassiz
, following a visit to the Alps where Agassiz demonstrated the effects of glaciation at first hand. As a result of the influence of Jameson, Buckland, and other advocates of natural theology, the nineteenth century debate over catastrophism took on much stronger religious overtones in Britain than elsewhere in Europe.
[8]
The rise of uniformitarianism in geology
[
edit
]
Uniformitarian explanations for the formation of
sedimentary rock
and an understanding of the immense stretch of
geological time
, or as the concept came to be known
deep time
, were found in the writing of
James Hutton
, sometimes known as the father of geology, in the late 18th century. The geologist
Charles Lyell
built upon Hutton's ideas during the first half of 19th century and amassed observations in support of the uniformitarian idea that the Earth's features had been shaped by same geological processes that could be observed in the present acting gradually over an immense period of time. Lyell presented his ideas in the influential three volume work,
Principles of Geology
, published in the 1830s, which challenged theories about geological cataclysms proposed by proponents of catastrophism like Cuvier and Buckland.
[9]
One of the key differences between catastrophism and uniformitarianism is that uniformitarianism observes the existence of vast timelines, whereas catastrophism does not. Today most geologists combine catastrophist and uniformitarianist standpoints, taking the view that
Earth's history
is a slow, gradual story punctuated by occasional natural catastrophic events that have affected Earth and its inhabitants.
[10]
From around 1850 to 1980, most geologists endorsed
uniformitarianism
("The present is the key to the past") and
gradualism
(
geologic change occurs slowly over long periods of time
) and rejected the idea that cataclysmic events such as
earthquakes
,
volcanic eruptions
, or floods of vastly greater power than those observed at the present time, played any significant role in the formation of the Earth's surface. Instead they believed that the earth had been shaped by the long term action of forces such as volcanism, earthquakes, erosion, and sedimentation, that could still be observed in action today. In part, the geologists' rejection was fostered by their impression that the catastrophists of the early nineteenth century believed that God was directly involved in determining the history of Earth. Some of the theories about Catastrophism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were connected with
religion
and catastrophic origins were sometimes considered
miraculous
rather than natural events.
[11]
The rise in uniformitarianism made the introduction of a new catastrophe theory very difficult. In 1923
J Harlen Bretz
published a paper on the
channeled scablands
formed by glacial
Lake Missoula
in Washington State, USA. Bretz encountered resistance to his theories from the geology establishment of the day, kicking off an acrimonious 40 year debate. Finally in 1979 Bretz received the
Penrose Medal
; the
Geological Society of America
's highest award.
[12]
Immanuel Velikovsky's views
[
edit
]
In the 1950s,
Immanuel Velikovsky
propounded catastrophism in several popular books. He speculated that the planet
Venus
is a former "
comet
" which was ejected from
Jupiter
and subsequently 3,500 years ago made two catastrophic close passes by Earth, 52 years apart, and later interacted with Mars, which then had a series of near collisions with Earth which ended in 687 BCE, before settling into its current
orbit
. Velikovsky used this to explain the biblical
plagues
of
Egypt
, the biblical reference to the "Sun standing still" for a day (Joshua 10:12 & 13, explained by changes in Earth's rotation), and the sinking of
Atlantis
. Scientists vigorously rejected Velikovsky's conjectures.
[13]
Current application
[
edit
]
Neocatastrophism is the explanation of sudden extinctions in the palaeontological record by high magnitude, low frequency events (such as asteroid impacts, super-volcanic eruptions, supernova gamma ray bursts, etc.), as opposed to the more prevalent
geomorphological
thought which emphasises low magnitude, high frequency events.
[14]
Luis Alvarez impact event hypothesis
[
edit
]
In 1980,
Walter
and
Luis Alvarez
published a paper suggesting that a 10 kilometres (6.2 mi)
asteroid
struck Earth
66 million years ago at the end of the
Cretaceous
period. The impact wiped out about 70% of all species, including the non-avian
dinosaurs
, leaving behind the
Cretaceous?Paleogene boundary
(K?T boundary). In 1990, a 180 kilometres (110 mi) candidate crater marking the impact was identified at
Chicxulub
in the
Yucatan Peninsula
of
Mexico
. These events sparked a wide acceptance of a scientifically based catastrophism with regard to certain events in the distant past.
Since then, the debate about the
extinction
of the dinosaurs and other
mass extinction
events has centered on whether the extinction mechanism was the asteroid impact, widespread volcanism (which occurred about the same time), or some other mechanism or combination. Most of the mechanisms suggested are catastrophic in nature.
The observation of the
Shoemaker-Levy 9
cometary collision with Jupiter illustrated that catastrophic events occur as natural events.
Moon-formation
[
edit
]
Modern theories also suggest that Earth's anomalously large
moon
was formed catastrophically. In a paper published in
Icarus
in 1975,
William K. Hartmann
and
Donald R. Davis
proposed that a catastrophic near-miss by a large
planetesimal
early in Earth's formation approximately 4.5 billion years ago blew out rocky debris, remelted Earth and formed the
Moon
, thus explaining the Moon's lesser density and
lack of an iron core
.
[15]
The impact theory does have some faults; some computer simulations show the formation of a ring or multiple moons post impact, and elements are not quite the same between the Earth and Moon.
[16]
[17]
[18]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Turney, C.S.M.; Brown, H. (2007). "Catastrophic early Holocene sea level rise, human migration and the Neolithic transition in Europe".
Quaternary Science Reviews
.
26
(17?18): 2036?2041.
Bibcode
:
2007QSRv...26.2036T
.
doi
:
10.1016/j.quascirev.2007.07.003
.
- ^
a
b
McGowan 2001
, pp. 3?6
- ^
a
b
Rudwick 1972
, pp. 133?134
- ^
King 1877
, p. 450
- ^
Rudwick 1972
, p. 131
- ^
Rudwick 1972
, pp. 133?135
- ^
Rudwick 1972
, p. 135
- ^
Rudwick 1972
, pp. 136?138
- ^
Rudwick 1972
, pp. 174?175
- ^
"Uniformitarianism"
.
The Columbia Encyclopedia
(6th ed.).
Columbia University Press
. 2007. Archived from
the original
on 2006-06-24.
- ^
Rudwick 1972
, pp. 174?179
- ^
Penrose Medal 1979
to J Harlen Bretz,
Geological Society of America
- ^
Krystek, Lee.
"Venus in the Corner Pocket: The Controversial Theories of Immanuel Velikovsky"
. Museum of Unnatural Mystery
. Retrieved
2007-12-14
.
- ^
Goudie, A.
Encyclopedia of Geomorphology
. p. 709.
- ^
Belbruno, J. R.; Gott III, J. Richard (2005). "Where Did The Moon Come From?".
The Astronomical Journal
.
129
(3): 1724?1745.
arXiv
:
astro-ph/0405372
.
Bibcode
:
2005AJ....129.1724B
.
doi
:
10.1086/427539
.
S2CID
12983980
.
- ^
"Moonwalk"
(PDF)
.
Geological Society of London
. September 2009
. Retrieved
2010-03-01
.
- ^
Binder, A.B. (1974). "On the origin of the Moon by rotational fission".
The Moon
.
11
(2): 53?76.
Bibcode
:
1974Moon...11...53B
.
doi
:
10.1007/BF01877794
.
S2CID
122622374
.
- ^
Stevenson, D. J. (1987). "Origin of the Moon-The Collision Hypothesis".
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences
.
15
: 271?315.
Bibcode
:
1987AREPS..15..271S
.
doi
:
10.1146/annurev.ea.15.050187.001415
.
Sources
[
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]
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Lewin, R.;
Complexity
, Dent, London, 1993, p. 75
- Palmer, T.;
Catastrophism, Neocatastrophism and Evolution
. Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in association with Nottingham Trent University, 1994,
ISBN
0-9514307-1-8
(SIS)
ISBN
0-905488-20-2
(Nottingham Trent University)
External links
[
edit
]