The History of Geology

Geology is, in itself, a historical science. Today, in addition to our trip around the BHS school grounds, we learned about some of the giants in geological thought. Folks like Aristotle, who championed observation and reason above all else and whose ideas were considered authoritative for over 2000 years. We learned about Steno, whose ideas about stratigraphy and relative dating set the stage for understanding sequences of geological events. Then, there were the two important Scotsman, Hutton and Lyell, whose ideas about uniformitarianism were a key influence in subsequent generations of scientists, from Charles Darwin to this day.

A major theme in geology is paradigms, or ways of viewing the world using a distinct set of ideas. An early paradigm in geology was that all landforms and geological events occurred catastrophically, by unimaginably large events that no longer occur today. Hutton and Lyell were instrumental in the next important paradigm, that of uniformitarianism, the belief that all geological events that occur today also occurred in the past and that they occured over long periods of time. Finally, our modern paradigm is a combination of the two earlier paradigms. We acknowledge that many geological events take immense periods of time to occur while some occur quite rapidly. The formation of canyons, such as the Grand Canyon, occurs over many millions of years. Mountain ranges are created by geological events, tectonic and otherwise, that occur over many millions of years. By contrast, impacts of meteorites, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and other more sudden events also leave their distinct mark in our landscape.

As far as our field trip around BHS, my favorite spot, if you couldn't tell, is the limestone bench in front of the school. It's not so comformtable to sit on, but who wants to sit on something that they can crouch down next to and find so many neat fossils and pyrite nodules? It just goes to illustrate that there is great geology to found all around us...if we just look!