Читать книгу Geology For Dummies - Alecia M. Spooner - Страница 50

Following Hutton’s work, Charles Lyell, a Scottish professor of geology in the early nineteenth century, published a book called Principles of Geology. In this book Lyell outlined and expanded on Hutton’s ideas about deep time, geologic processes, and the formation of rock features on Earth’s surface.

In publishing his book, Lyell spread Hutton’s ideas and popularized them. The concept that “the present is the key to the past” was groundbreaking at the time and inspired scientific thought in fields outside of geology, such as Darwin’s ideas about evolution.

The basic principle that Hutton proposed, called uniformitarianism, is still the foundation of geologic science. Simply put, it states that past geologic phenomena can be explained by drawing on observable processes occurring today.