Читать книгу Geology For Dummies - Alecia M. Spooner - Страница 43

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using catastrophe to explain geologic phenomena

Proposing origins for Earth’s rocks

Arriving at modern ideas about the earth

Using today’s processes to understand the past

Unifying theories with plate tectonics

Continuing to ask questions

For many sciences, the foundations of modern thought were laid during Europe’s Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this time great thinkers began to redefine how they examined and understood the world around them. Although important advances were made in astronomy, mathematics, anatomy, and other sciences during this time, advancement of geologic science was constrained by a widely held belief that the Bible described an accurate age of the earth at only a few thousand years.

As a result, the road to modern geologic theories did not begin to be paved until later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, significant insights into the earth’s systems are still occurring today. In this chapter, I describe the important theories presented along the way to our current understanding of the earth and its systems. I also describe the sequence of important hypotheses that led to a unifying theory of the earth (called plate tectonics theory), as well as some of the exciting areas of current geologic research.