![]() ![]() He was a far better thinker than writer – once he did get into print in 1788, few people were able to make sense of his highly technical and confusing writing (to learn more about Hutton and see a sample of his writing, visit the Resources for this module). Hutton's ideas were not immediately embraced by the scientific community, largely because he was reluctant to publish. While many of Hutton's ideas about the rock cycle were either vague (such as "conversion to rock") or inaccurate (such as heat causing decay), he made the important first step of putting diverse processes together into a simple, coherent theory. Heat caused sediments deposited in basins to be converted to rock, heat caused the uplift of mountain ranges, and heat contributed in part to the weathering of rock. As shown in Figure 1, Hutton first conceived of the rock cycle as a process driven by Earth's internal heat engine. Recycling was a radical departure from the prevailing notion of a largely unchanging Earth. Instead, those sediments once deposited in the sea must be frequently lifted back up to form new mountain ranges. If there were no recycling, mountains would erode (or continents would decay, in Hutton's terms), the sediments would be transported to the sea, and eventually the surface of the Earth would be perfectly flat and covered with a thin layer of water. Hutton argued that in order for uniformitarianism to work over very long periods of time, Earth materials had to be constantly recycled. Figure 1: This image shows how James Hutton first envisioned the rock cycle. By comparison, the strict biblical interpretation, common at the time, suggested that the processes that had created the landscape were complete and no longer at work. Hutton called this the principle of uniformitarianism: Processes that occur today are the same ones that occurred in the past to create the landscape and rocks as we see them now. It would take many millions of years, reasoned Hutton, to deposit a hundred meters of sediment in this fashion, not just the few weeks allowed by the Biblical flood. Every year, these rivers would flood, depositing a thin layer of sediment in the floodplain. In the mid-1700s, a Scottish physician named James Hutton began to challenge the literal interpretation of the Bible by making detailed observations of rivers near his home. When naturalists found fossils of marine creatures high in the Alps, many devout believers interpreted the Old Testament literally and suggested that the perched fossils were a result of the biblical Noah's flood. Most 17th century European Christians believed that the Earth was essentially unchanged from the time of creation. The Navajo view processes on the surface as interactions between opposite but complementary entities: the sky and the Earth. Early Greeks ascribed earthquakes to the god Poseidon expressing his wrath, an explanation that accounted for their unpredictability. Throughout human history, different groups of people have held to a wide variety of beliefs to explain these changes. If you live near an active fault zone or volcano, you experience infrequent but catastrophic events like earthquakes and eruptions. Deep in the interior of continents, change is less evident – rivers may flood and change course only every 100 years or so. If you live near the coast, you see daily, monthly, and yearly changes in the shape of the coastline. We all see changes in the landscape around us, but your view of how fast things change is probably determined by where you live. Understanding Scientific Journals and Articles.Using Graphs and Visual Data in Science.Scientists and the Scientific Community.Scientific Notation and Order of Magnitude.The Case of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Camillo Golgi.Factors that Control Earth's Temperature.Plates, Plate Boundaries, and Driving Forces.Solutions, Solubility, and Colligative Properties.Y-Chromsome and Mitochondrial DNA Haplotypes.Absorption, Distribution, and Storage of Chemicals.
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