As for the universe itself, the search for its age continues. In 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble worked out that the galaxies are flying apart as a consequence of the Big Bang with which the universe originated. Allan Sandage of the Carnegie Observatories in California, who worked with Hubble, corrected Hubble’s calculations and first estimated that the age of the universe was 15 billion years, which was then recalculated to be 13.7 billion years. What is beyond doubt is that the universe is expanding.
One thing had not changed as geology entered its third century. Geology versus Genesis still rages, despite all the territory apparently secured by the former. ‘Scriptural Geology’, the Reverend Young’s essay of 1840, has been republished as a paperback and is available on bookselling websites such as Amazon. In 2008 in Florida, the State Board of Education found it necessary to rule (by the narrow margin of four to three) that ‘while belief in a Divine Creator of the universe is a religious belief, the scientific theory that higher forms of life evolved from lower ones is not’. Sarah Palin, the former Republican US vice-presidential candidate, argued for teaching ‘intelligent design’ as science in schools. A British group called ‘Truth in Science’ works to introduce ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’ into schools as a counterbalance to the requirement of the National Curriculum for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, that students be taught that ‘the fossil record is evidence for evolution’. At the same time Britain’s leading scientific polemicist, Richard Dawkins, declared in his 2006 bestseller, The God Delusion, that teaching creationism to children is a kind of child abuse. A solution (one that displeased Dawkins) was suggested in an editorial in Nature that asked what scientists might do to counter the appeal of ‘intelligent design’ (as distinct from the more literal ‘creationism’): ‘All scientists whose classes are faced with such concerns should familiarise themselves with some basic arguments as to why evolution, cosmology and geology are not competing with religion. When they walk into the lecture hall, they should be prepared to talk about what science can and cannot do, and how it fits in with different religious beliefs.’6 Dawkins and many others – not just scientists – feel that is needlessly conciliatory, claiming too little for the astonishing insights of modern science and offering an apology for the endlessly changing nature of scientific knowledge it establishes where none is needed.
For all the efforts of the original geologists to distinguish the Noachian deluge from natural processes, some still believe that the Bible’s account of the Flood is literally true. A new speciality called ‘Flood Geology’ is flourishing, particularly among creationists in the United States. Its believers have searched (so far in vain) for remnants of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat.7
What has been shown is that in ancient times there was indeed a massive flood – yet not in the geographical place the Bible suggests, but rather in what is now the Black Sea. In 1999 Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History, by William Ryan and Walter Pitman, claimed that 7,000 years ago a land barrier gave way and the Mediterranean Sea rushed through the Dardanelles, severing Asia from Europe, turning a pre-existing lake into the Black Sea. Archaeologists had previously assumed that the historic reality behind cultural spread of the deluge legend had been an exceptional flood of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. But many are now persuaded that ‘the Flood’ was in fact the far more ancient drowning of the pre-Black Sea lake, a traumatic natural disaster that would explain the cultural spread of the Flood legend.
Another mystery closer to solution is the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous period, beginning about 145 million years ago, was their heyday. The earth was much warmer than it is today and it was a period of great geological and biological unrest. And it ended, according to Nature, ‘in spectacular style, with the global catastrophe that saw off dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, an event known as the Cretaceous/Palaeogene (K/Pg) extinction’.8 It has been widely thought that the devastation was caused by an asteroid or a comet striking the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula, but more clues have emerged with the digging of a kilometre-deep hole in eastern China which show that climate fluctuations might hold the clue.
Of even wider popular interest is the unending debate about whether the complexity of the universe – or, indeed, of the multiplicity of universes which seem to keep appearing – is evidence of God as creator. Religious faith in an age of science seems more than ever to be a matter of personal belief rather than of persuasion by the complexity of the cosmos. In 2010 Stephen Hawking all but apologised for having ended his bestselling A Brief History of Time in 1988 with the mischievous assertion that if we knew the theory of everything which explained the existence of the universe ‘then we should know the mind of God’.9 The famous line may have helped sales, he concedes, but in The Grand Design (written in 2010 with Leonard Mlodinow), he maintains that modern physics leaves no room for God. The equally famous and openly atheistic scientist Richard Dawkins has never wavered in his unbelief – a view shared by many scientists.
The biggest change in understanding the planet earth has come with the discovery of plate tectonics. In 1915 the German geologist Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift: that pieces of the earth’s crust move slowly over a fluid mantle. He maintained that the planet originally held only one giant continent, to which he gave the name ‘Pangaea’ (Greek for ‘whole earth’), and that Pangaea started to break into two smaller continents – he called them ‘Laurasia’ and ‘Gondwanaland’ – 250 million years ago.
Wegener was fascinated by the glaring fact that on a map the Atlantic Ocean looks as if its two sides had been pulled apart. To him, the configuration suggested that the Atlantic was an enormously widened rift with the sides still matching ‘as closely as the lines of a torn drawing would correspond if the pieces were placed in juxtaposition’.10
Arthur Holmes, commenting on Wegener’s ideas, wrote on the closing pages of his classic Principles of Physical Geology, first published in 1944: ‘The parallelism of the opposing shores of the Atlantic has been a subject of discussion ever since Francis Bacon first drew attention to it in 1620.’11 In papers in the 1920s and 1930s he had mentioned continental drift as the cause but the idea was not accepted until the 1960s. American geologists were particularly reluctant to accept it.12 Holmes’s influential textbook, however, endorsed continental drift in its last summary chapter.
In the 1960s the ‘widening Atlantic’ idea became refined and deepened as the theory of plate tectonics. It is now beyond question that the various plates of the earth’s crust drift, collide, slip past or under each other. This resolved the long controversy over how mountain belts were thrown up, whether by sudden change or inch by inch. Under the seas, the plates spread from mid-oceanic rift zones where magma from within the earth’s mantle comes to the surface. When one plate slips under the other, intensive folding forms high mountain ridges (like the Andes and the Himalayas) and magma can rise and form volcanoes.
It is now accepted that there were supercontinents before Pangaea and that others will follow. In his 2007 book Supercontinent, the geoscientist Ted Nield has written: ‘the world we see today is no more than Pangaea’s smashed remains, the fragments of the dinner plate that dropped on the floor’.13
Geologists have found evidence that between 635 and 716 million years ago sea ice extended to the equator – bolstering the theory that at times the planet has been covered with ice at all latitudes and that some of these Ice Ages lasted for millions of years. ‘“Snowball Earth” Confirmed: Ice Covered Equator’, the National Geographic declared in 2010.14 The discovery was made by Harvard University scientists who, studying volcanic rocks in Canada, found these rocks sandwiched between glacial rocks known from previous magnetic studies to have formed when Canada was near the Equator. Thus, over time – a great length of time – the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates pushed the rocks to northwest Canada.
One thing is certain: the permanence of change. I
t has been calculated, says Nield in Supercontinent, that in another 200 million years or so, a new supercontinent will be born.15 Well before that, Africa will get a new ocean. In northern Ethiopia, the Great Rift Valley (one of the hottest places on earth) is splitting apart. The rift is sixty kilometres long, and, according to the summer exhibition of the Royal Society in 2010, marks the birthplace of Africa’s new ocean.
Over time, the sides of the Atlantic will continue to grow farther apart. This spread occurs along the mid-Atlantic ridge, stretching along the ocean floor from the Arctic to the Antarctic. In the middle of this ridge is a north–south deep valley, or rift.
A pleasant place to observe this phenomenon is Iceland. The mid-Atlantic ridge runs down the middle of the island and lies above sea level. It includes a deep rift, into which visitors, standing on a rocky promontory high above Gullfoss, ‘the golden waterfall’, can stare down and marvel, some getting vertigo from the clarity of the water. Before their eyes, although scarcely perceptible, the North American and the Eurasian plates are pulling apart at the rate at which fingernails grow.
Trying to understand the planet’s rocks and oceans is a challenge that will endure. New knowledge will constantly wipe out the certainties of the past. Geologist and writer Richard Fortey has wryly observed that the first-century Roman historian Suetonius ‘would have dismissed me as a madman had I pointed out to him that Vesuvius is a consequence, ultimately, of Africa moving bodily northwards’.
But Africa really is on the move. As Fortey explains: ‘The northern edge of the African plate is plunging beneath the southern tip of Italy which twists and deforms the rocks and uplifts the limestone hills.’ Volcanoes then rise up ‘like sticky blood oozing from deep wounds where the earth’s crust thinned’. Everything around Naples, Fortey says, is controlled by the movements and interactions of tectonic plates far below the surface.16
What would Charles Lyell have made of that? A sense of exhilaration, of revelation, of vindication?
At the very least, a new edition of Principles, no doubt.
NOTES
FOREWORD
1Brenda Maddox, George Eliot : Novelist, Lover, Wife, London: Harper Press, 2009; George Eliot in Love, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
2Cited in Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, Vol. 2: The Power of Place, New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002, p. 63.
3Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 37.
CHAPTER 1 THE ABYSS OF TIME
1Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, edited with an introduction by James A. Secord, London: Penguin Classics, 1997, p. 6 (referred to hereafter as Lyell/Secord, Principles).
2Katherine Murray Lyell (ed.), Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., London: John Murray, 1881, Vol. 2, p. 14.
3Roy Porter, ‘Gentlemen and Geology: the Emergence of a Scientific Career, 1660–1920’, The Historical Journal, 21.4, Dec 1978, p. 815; Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856, London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 193.
4James Secord, citing Spectator, 14 Jan 1832, introduction, Lyell/Secord, Principles, p. 39.
5Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, London: Harper Press, 2008, p. 244.
6Holmes, Age of Wonder, p. 289.
7Jack Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity, Cambridge, Mass., Perseus, 2003, pp. 17–18.
8Cited in Holmes, Age of Wonder, p. 296.
9See Victor R. Baker, ‘Catastrophism and uniformitarianism’, London: Geological Society, Special Publications 1998, v. 143, p. 174.
10Leonard G. Wilson, Charles Lyell: The Years to 1841: The Revolution in Geology, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972, p. 138.
11Lyell to Mantell, 3 Nov 1831, cited in Christopher McGowan, The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin, Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus 2001, p. 44.
12Ibid.
13Lyell to Mantell, Mar 1831, Lyell (ed.), Life, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1, p. 317.
14Lyell/Secord, Principles, p. xxiv, citing Lyell to Scrope, 14 Jun 1830, in Lyell (ed.), Life, Letters and Journals, p. 268.
15Lyell to C. Baggage, 3 May 1832, in Wilson, Revolution in Geology, p. 353.
16Lyell to Mary Horner, 1 May 1832, in Lyell (ed.), Life, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1, p. 353.
17Ibid., p. 354.
18Lyell to Mary Horner, 31 Dec 1831, in ibid., p. 360.
19Lyell to Mary Horner, 17 Feb 1832, in ibid., p. 344.
20Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, London: Allen Lane, 2009, p. 161.
21Lyell/Secord, Principles, p. 30.
22Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, London: Black Swan, 2003, pp. 103–4, observes that many cite the date as 26 October 4004 bc. Others differ in the timing, placing it either on the evening of 22 October, or midday on 23 October.
23Jim Endersby, ‘Creative Designs’, Times Literary Supplement, 16 Mar 2007.
24Dennis R. Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 29. In the introduction to Lyell/Secord’s Principles (p. 452, n. 7) Secord describes Lyell’s ‘celebrated misquotation’ – ‘In the economy of the world, I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end’ – as ‘the most celebrated statement in the history of the earth sciences’. He attributes it to Lyell’s using Playfair as a text.
25Hutton cited in Lyell/Secord, Principles, p. 14.
26Dean, James Hutton, p. 29.
27Lyell/Secord, Principles, p. 15; and Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time, p. 65.
28Lyell/Secord, Principles, p. 234.
29Review of Buffon by Jacques Roger in Nature, 6 Nov 1997, Vol. 390, p. 37.
30Richard Fortey, ‘Lyell and Deep Time’, Geoscientist, 9 October 2011, Vol. 21, No. 9, p. 14.
31James Hutton, Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations, Vol. 1, Edinburgh: William Creech, 1795, p. 183.
32See Charles Coulton Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: The Impact of Scientific Discoveries upon Religious Beliefs in the Decades Before Darwin, New York: Harper & Row, 1951; HarperTorchbook, 1959.
33Ibid. It may be noted that the tempting combination of the two words still flows easily off the tongue; books such as Genesis and Geology continue to appear.
34John Playfair, The Works of John Playfair, with a memoir of the Author, 4 vols, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1822, p. 80.
35Stephen Jay Gould quoted in Prologue of Jack Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time , p. 1.
36Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 2.
37Dr Iain Stewart, ‘Men of Rock’ documentary, BBC4, broadcast 6 Jan 2011.
CHAPTER 2 HEALTHFUL EXERTION
1George Henry Lewes, Sea-Side Studies, Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1858, p. 11.
2Cited in C. L. E. Lewis and S. J. Knell (eds), The Making of the Geological Society of London, London: Geological Society, 2009, p. 14.
3Robert Bakewell, An Introduction to Geology, London: J. Harding, 1813, p. 22.
4Ibid., p. 361.
5John F. W. Herschel, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, London, 1831, p. 287.
6Lyell/Secord, Principles, pp. 24–5.
7Ibid., p. 25.
8Porter, ‘Gentlemen and Geology’, p. 850.
9Cited in Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989, pp. 66–7.
10John Davy (ed.), The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, Vol. 1, London: 1839, p. 50.
11William Wordsworth, The Excursion, London: Edward Moxon, 1836, p. 83.
12Lyell/Secord, Principles, p. 10.
1
3Ibid., p. 11. The spelling ‘Freyberg’ is Lyell’s own.
14Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, Everyman Paperback, 1967, pp. 19–29.
15Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 353.
16John Davy (ed.), The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, Vol. 1, London: 1839, p. 466.
17Sedgwick to his American cousins, Mrs Norton and Miss Sedgwick, 8 Jul 1869, in J. W. Clark and T. M. Hughes (eds), The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, London: C. J. Clay and Sons for Cambridge University Press, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 123.
CHAPTER 3 DOWN THE MINES
1George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Chapter 2. The actual quote reads ‘Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal . . .’
2Lyell/Secord, Principles, p. 9.
3W. S. Jevons, The Coal Question, London: Macmillan, 1866, p. 376.
4Matt Ridley, ‘Want Cheap Energy?’, The Times, 5 May 2011.
CHAPTER 4 VESTIGES OF PATERNITY
1Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World, London: Penguin, 2002, pp. 91–2.
2A. Sedgwick, ‘Address to the Geological Society’, Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, London: the Geological Society, 1831, Vol. 1, p. 368.
3Clark and Hughes (eds), Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Vol. 1, p. 368.
4Gordon L. Herries Davies, Whatever is Under the Earth: the Geological Society of London 1807–2007, London: Geological Society, 2007, p. 79.
5Winchester, Map That Changed the World, p. 68.
6Ibid., p. 81.
Reading the Rocks Page 21