Kosmos ~ Chapter 17

Chapter 17 of Kosmos deals with geology. Being an English major who has avoided most science and mathematics courses while at Clemson, the first thing I did upon completing the reading was find out a little more about geology starting with the answer to this question: What is Geology? This is what I’ve found:

Geology is the study of the Earth, the materials of which it is made, the structure of those materials, and the processes acting upon them. It includes the study of the organisms which inhabit our planet. A very important part of geology is the study of how Earth’s materials, structures, processes and organisms have changed over time.

After reading up on the science of geology itself I came to the conclusion that geology, unlike most other sciences, deals less in the pursuit of absolute truths (just my opinion). While the author touches on many different viewpoints of many different geologists the one that I found most interesting while reading this article was the ideology behind uniformitarianism. It is argued that the uniformitarianism scale could be used to foreshadow future geographical events. Uniformitarianism can be summarized by the phrase "the present is the key to the past." It was a direct rejection of the prevalent theory of the time, catastrophism, which held that only violent disasters could modify the surface of the earth.

Today, most people (including myself) hold uniformitarianism to be true and know that great disasters such as hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and the earthquake in China are all a part of the natural cycles of Earth.