In 1923, J Harlen Bretz boldly
advocated that the Channeled Scablands of Washington (East of Seattle) had a
catastrophic origin. He was scorned by
his peers for many decades. NOVA had an
episode on "one of the Earth's strangest geological riddles" in their
show Mystery of the Megaflood which
highlights Bretz' story.
Today catastrophism is on the rise
and even underlies the mainstream explanation for the extinction of the
dinosaurs. Since around 1980, we are now
in the Renaissance of Catastrophism - hear the podcast here.
Even Wikipedia has a page on the risk
of global catastrophe. According to a
paper published in Nature in 1994, there's
a 1-in-10K chance that a large asteroid (~2km wide) could hit the Earth within
this century and wipe out a large portion of the world's population.
Derek Ager was President of the
British Geological Association and wrote The
New Catastrophism which provides a plethora of examples of rapid geologic
action. If most rocks formed fast, could
this planet be young (thousands, not billions of years old)?
The famous 1929 Grand Banks
earthquake off Newfoundland caused a turbidity current where telegraph cables broke
and thus recorded its speed of up to 60 mph!
This formed a turbidite which are abundant in the rock record.
"A science’s level of
development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in
its basic concepts."
- Martin Heidegger
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