Catastrophism: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 10:24, 13 July 2007
Catastrophism is the idea that Earth has been affected by sudden, short-lived, violent events that were sometimes worldwide in scope.
The dominant paradigm of geology has been uniformitarianism (also sometimes described as gradualism), but recently a more inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed resulting in a gradual change in the scientific consensus, reflecting acceptance of some catastrophic events.
History of catastrophism
The creationism view
Before uniformitarianism, the dominant belief in many cultures of the creation and development of the world was essentially catastrophism. The biblical account of the Great Flood is a prime example of these beliefs. Earth's history was viewed as the result of an accumulation of catastrophic events over a relatively short time period. It was basically the only way to rationalize the observations of early geologists with a believed short history of Earth before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Cuvier and the natural theologians
The leading scientific proponent of catastrophism in the early 19th 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 never made any reference to the Noachian flood. [1] 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. [2] 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, and this lead him to believe the Earth was several million years old. [3]
By contrast in England, where natural theology was very influential during the early 19th century, a group of geologists that included William Buckland and Robert Jameson would interpret Cuvier's work in a very different way. Jameson translated the introduction Cuvier wrote for a collection of his papers on fossil quadrapeds that discussed his ideas on castastrophic extinction into English and published it under the title 'Theory of the Earth'. He added extensive editorial notes to the translation that explicitly linked the latest of Cuvier's revolutions with the Biblical flood and the resulting essay was extremely influential in the English speaking world. [4]. Buckland spent much of his early career trying to demonstrate the reality of the Biblical flood with geological evidence, and he frequently cited Cuvier's work even though Cuvier had proposed an inundation of limited geographic extent and extended duration, and Buckland, consistent with the Biblical account, was advocating a universal flood of short duration. [5] Eventually, Buckland would abandon flood geology in favor of the glaciation theory advocated by Louis Agassiz who had briefly been one of Cuvier's students. As a result of the influence of Jameson, Buckland, and other advocates of natural theology the 19th century debate over catestrophism took on religious overtones in Britain that were not nearly as prominent elsewhere. [6]
Scientific paradigm shift
Starting in the late 18th century, scientists began looking to other paradigms for explaining geological formations. Two early proponents of the uniformitarian explanations for the formation of sedimentary rock and the beginnings of an understanding of the immense stretch of geological time or 'Deep time' were the eighteenth century 'father of geology' James Hutton and the nineteenth century geologist Charles Lyell.
- At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great French geologist and naturalist Baron Georges Cuvier proposed what came to be known as the Catastrophe theory or Catastrophism. According to the theory, the abrupt faunal changes geologists saw in rock strata were the result of periodic devastations that wiped out all or most extant species, each successive period being repopulated with new kinds of animals and plants, by God's hand. [Charles] Lyell rejected so nonscientific a hypothesis (as did James Hutton before him), and replaced it with the notion that geological processes proceeded gradually - all geological processes. (Lewin, 1993)
The rise of uniformitarianism
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 nineteenth century believed that God was directly involved in determining the history of Earth. Catastrophism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was closely tied to religion and catastrophic origins were considered miraculous rather than natural events. [7].
Immanuel Velikovsky's views
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 B.C.E., 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 (explained by changes in Earth's rotation), and the sinking of Atlantis. Scientists consider Velikovsky's theories to be pseudoscience at best. Carl Sagan, for example, made a point to refute his ideological principles.
Catastrophism re-emerging and re-examined by science
Luis Alvarez impact event hypothesis
Over the past 25 years, however, a scientifically based catastrophism has gained wide acceptance with regard to certain events in the distant past. One impetus for this change came from the publication of a historic paper by Walter and Luis Alvarez in 1980. This paper suggested that a 10-kilometer asteroid struck Earth 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. The impact wiped out about 70% of all species, including the dinosaurs, leaving behind the so-called K-T boundary. In 1990, a 180-kilometer candidate crater marking the impact was identified at Chicxulub in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.
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.
Catastrophism theory and Moon-formation
Modern theories also suggest that Earth's anomalously large moon was formed catastrophically. In a paper published in Icarus in 1975, Dr. William K. Hartmann and Dr. Donald R. Davis proposed that a stochastic 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. See giant impact theory for a more detailed description.
Comet Encke is believed to be the originator of the Taurid meteor shower (Whipple, 1940; Klačka, 1999).
Comparing and combining catastrophism with uniformitarianism
One of the key differences between catastrophism and uniformitarianism is that to function, uniformitarianism requires the assumption of vast timelines, whereas catastrophism can function with or without assumptions of long timelines.
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.
See also
- Uniformitarianism
- Gradualism
- Paradigm shift
- Punctuated equilibrium (occasional periods of sudden change in evolution)
- Supervolcano
- Flood basalt
- Volcanic winter
- Glacial lake outburst flood
- Megatsunami
- History of geology
- History of paleontology
- Kronos: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis
Notes
References
- Lewin, R. (1993). Complexity, Dent, London, p. 75.
- Palmer, T. (1994) Catastrophism, Neocatastrophism and Evolution. Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in association with Nottingham Trent University. ISBN 0-9514307-1-8 (SIS) ISBN 0-905488-20-2 (Nottingham Trent University)
- Rudwick, Martin J.S. The Meaning of Fossils. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago 1972. ISBN 0-226-73103-0
- McGowan, Christopher The Dragon Hunters. Persus Publishing: Cambridge MA 2001. ISBN 0-7382-0282-7
- Klačka, Jozef (1999). "Meteor Streams of Comet Encke. Taurid Meteor Complex". Abstract
- Whipple, F.L. (1940). "Photographic meteor studies. III. The Taurid shower." Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., 83, 711-745.
External links
- Catastrophism and Mass Extinctions
- The Fall and Rise of Catastrophism
- Venus in the Corner Pocket : The Controversial Theories of Immanuel Velikovsky
- "The origin of the moon'.
- Saturnian Cosmology
- Catastrophism! Man, Myth and Mayhem in Ancient History and the Sciences
- Answers In Creation - Catastrophism Article
- Dictionary of the History of Ideas: "Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism"
- Super floods and Catastrophism: The Controversial Theories of Hans-Joachim Zillmer