








Origins in prehistoric times

The origins of the Earth sciences lie in the myths and legends of the distant past. The creation story, which can be traced to a Babylonian epic of the 22nd century BC and which is told in the first chapter of Genesis, has proved most influential. The story is cast in the form of Earth history and thus was readily accepted as an embodiment of scientific as well as of theological truth.

Earth scientists later made innumerable observations of natural phenomena and interpreted them in an increasingly multidisciplinary manner. The Earth sciences, however, were slow to develop largely because the progress of science was constrained by whatever society would tolerate or support at any one time.

Geologic sciences
Knowledge of Earth composition and structure

The oldest known treatise on rocks and minerals is the De lapidibus (“On Stones”) of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus(c.372–c.287 BC). Written probably in the early years of the 3rd century, this work remained the best study of mineral substances for almost 2,000 years. Although reference is made to some 70 different materials, the work is more an effort at classification than systematic description.

In early Chinese writings on mineralogy, stones and rocks were distinguished from metals and alloys, and further distinctions were made on the basis of colour and other physical properties. The speculations of Cheng Ssu-hsiao (died AD 1332) on the origin of ore deposits were more advanced than those of his contemporaries in Europe. In brief, his theory was that ore is deposited from groundwater circulating in subsurface fissures.

Ancient accounts of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are sometimes valuable as historical records but tell little about the causes of these events. Aristotle (384–322 BC) and Strabo (64 BCc. AD 21) held that volcanic explosions and earthquakes alike are caused by spasmodic motions of hot winds that move underground and occasionally burst forth in volcanic activity attended by Earth tremors. Classical and medieval ideas on earthquakes and volcanoes were brought together in William Caxton’s Mirrour of the World (1480). Earthquakes are here again related to movements of subterranean fluids. Streams of water in the Earth compress the air in hidden caverns. If the roofs of the caverns are weak, they rupture, causing cities and castles to fall into the chasms; if strong, they merely tremble and shake from the heaving by the wind below. Volcanic action follows if the outburst of wind and water from the depths is accompanied by fire and brimstone from hell.

The Chinese have the distinction of keeping the most faithful records of earthquakes and of inventing the first instrument capable of detecting them. Records of the dates on which major quakes rocked China date to 780 BC. To detect quakes at a distance, the mathematician, astronomer, and geographer Chang Heng(AD 78–139) invented what has been called the first seismograph.

Knowledge of Earth history

The occurrence of seashells embedded in the hard rocks of high mountains aroused the curiosity of early naturalists and eventually set off a controversy on the origin of fossils that continued through the 17th century. Xenophanesof Colophon (flourished c. 560 BC) was credited by later writers with observing that seashells occur “in the midst of earth and in mountains.” He is said to have believed that these relics originated during a catastrophic event that caused the Earth to be mixed with the sea and then to settle, burying organisms in the drying mud. For these views Xenophanes is sometimes called the father of paleontology.

Petrified wood was described by Chinese scholars as early as the 9th century AD, and around 1080 Shen Kuacited fossilized plants as evidence for change in climate. Other kinds of fossils that attracted the attention of early Chinese writers include spiriferoid brachiopods (“stone swallows”), cephalopods, crabs, and the bones and teeth of reptiles, birds, and mammals. Although these objects were commonly collected simply as curiosities or for medicinal purposes, Shen Kua recognized marine invertebrate fossils for what they are and for what they imply historically. Observing seashells in strata of the T’ai-hang Shan range, he concluded that this region, though now far from the sea, must once have been a shore.

Knowledge of landforms and of land–sea relations

Changes in the landscape and in the position of land and sea related to erosion and deposition by streams were recognized by some early writers. The Greek historian Herodotus(c. 484–c .426 BC) correctly concluded that the northward bulge of Egypt into the Mediterranean is caused by the deposition of mud carried by the Nile.

The early Chinese writers were not outdone by the Romans and Greeks in their appreciation of changes wrought by erosion. In the Chin shu (“History of the Chin Dynasty”), it is said of Tu Yü (AD 222–284) that when he ordered monumental stelae to be carved with the records of his successes, he had one buried at the foot of a mountain and the other erected on top. He predicted that in time they would likely change their relative positions, because the high hills will become valleys and the deep valleys will become hills.

Aristotle guessed that changes in the position of land and sea might be cyclical in character, thus reflecting some sort of natural order. If the rivers of a moist region should build deltas at their mouths, he reasoned, seawater would be displaced and the level of the sea would rise to cover some adjacent dry region. A reversal of climatic conditions might cause the sea to return to the area from which it had previously been displaced and retreat from the area previously inundated. The idea of a cyclical interchange between land and sea was elaborated in the Discourses of the Brothers of Purity, a classic Arabic work written between AD 941 and 982 by an anonymous group of scholars at Basra (Iraq). The rocks of the lands disintegrate and rivers carry their wastage to the sea, where waves and currents spread it over the seafloor. There the layers of sediment accumulate one above the other, harden, and, in the course of time, rise from the bottom of the sea to form new continents. Then the process of disintegration and leveling begins again.

Hydrologic and atmospheric sciences

The only substance known to the ancient philosophers in its solid, liquid, and gaseous states, water is prominently featured in early theories about the origin and operations of the Earth. Thales of Miletus(c. 624–c. 545 BC) is credited with a belief that water is the essential substance of the Earth, and Anaximander of Miletus (c.610–545 BC) held that water was probably the source of life. In the system proposed by Empedocles of Agrigentum (c. 490–430 BC), water shared the primacy Thales had given it with three other elements: fire, air, and earth. The doctrine of the four earthly elements was later embodied in the universal system of Aristotle and thereby influenced Western scientific thought until late in the 17th century.

Knowledge of the hydrologic cycle

The idea that the waters of the Earth undergo cyclical motions, changing from seawater to vapour to precipitation and then flowing back to the ocean, is probably older than any of the surviving texts that hint at or frame it explicitly.

The idea of the hydrological cycle developed independently in China as early as the 4th century BC and was explicitly stated in the Lü-shih Ch’un Ch’iu (“The Spring and Autumn [Annals] of Mr. Lü”), written in the 3rd century BC. A circulatory system of a different kind, involving movements of water on a large scale within the Earth, was envisioned by Plato(c. 428–348/347 BC). In one of his two explanations for the origin of rivers and springs, he described the Earth as perforated by passages connecting with Tartarus, a vast subterranean reservoir.

A coherent theory of precipitation is found in the writings of Aristotle. Moisture on the Earth is changed to airy vapour by heat from above. Because it is the nature of heat to rise, the heat in the vapour carries it aloft. When the heat begins to leave the vapour, the vapour turns to water. The formation of water from air produces clouds. Heat remaining in the clouds is further opposed by the cold inherent in the water and is driven away. The cold presses the particles of the cloud closer together, restoring in them the true nature of the element water. Water naturally moves downward, and so it falls from the cloud as raindrops. Snow falls from clouds that have frozen.

In Aristotle’s system the four earthly elements were not stable but could change into one another. If air can change to water in the sky, it should also be able to change into water underground.

The origin of the Nile

Of all the rivers known to the ancients, the Nile was most puzzling with regard to its sources of water. Not only does this river maintain its course up the length of Egypt through a virtually rainless desert, but it rises regularly in flood once each year.

Speculations on the strange behaviour of the Nile were many, varied, and mostly wrong. Thales suggested that the strong winds that blow southward over the delta in summertime hold back the flow of the river and cause the waters to rise upstream in flood. Oenopides of Chios (flourished c.475 BC) thought that heat stored in the ground during the winter dries up the underground veins of water so that the river shrinks. In the summer the heat disappears, and water flows up into the river, causing floods. In the view of Diogenes of Apollonia (flourished c.435 BC), the Sun controls the regimen of the stream. The idea that the Nile waters connect with the sea is an old one, tracing back to the geographic concepts of Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 520 BC). Reasonable explanations related the discharge of the Nile to precipitation in the headwater regions, as snow (Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, c. 500–428 BC) or from rain that filled lakes supposed to have fed the river (Democritus of Abdera, c. 460–c. 357 BC). Eratosthenes (c. 276–194 BC), who had prepared a map of the Nile Valley southward to the latitude of modern Khartoum, anticipated the correct answer when he reported that heavy rains had been observed to fall in the upper reaches of the river and that these were sufficient to account for the flooding.

Knowledge of the tides

The tides of the Mediterranean, being inconspicuous in most places, attracted little notice from Greek and Roman naturalists. Poseidonius(135–50 BC) first correlated variations in the tides with phases of the Moon.

By contrast, the tides along the eastern shores of Asia generally have a considerable range and were the subject of close observation and much speculation among the Chinese. In particular, the tidal bore on the Ch’ien-t’ang Chiang (Ch’ien-t’ang River) near Hang-chou attracted early attention; with its front ranging up to 3.7 metres in height, this bore is one of the largest in the world. As early as the 2nd century BC, the Chinese had recognized a connection between tides and tidal bores and the lunar cycle.

Prospecting for groundwater

Although the origin of the water in the Earth that seeps or springs from the ground was long the subject of much fanciful speculation, the arts of finding and managing groundwater were already highly developed in the 8th century BC. The construction of long, hand-dug underground aqueducts (qanats) in Armenia and Persia represents one of the great hydrologic achievements of the ancient world. After some 3,000 years qanatsare still a major source of water in Iran.

In the 1st century BC, Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio), a Roman architect and engineer, described methods of prospecting for groundwater in his De architectura libri decem (The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, in Ten Books). To locate places where wells should be dug, he recommended looking for spots where mist rises in early morning. More significantly, Vitruvius had learned to associate different quantities and qualities of groundwater with different kinds of rocks and topographic situations.

After the inspired beginnings of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Arabs, little or no new information was collected, and no new ideas were produced throughout the Middle Ages, appropriately called the Dark Ages. It was not until the Renaissance in the early 16th century that the Earth sciences began to develop again.

The 16th–18th centuries
Geologic sciences
Ore deposits and mineralogy

A common belief among alchemists of the 16th and 17th centuries held that metalliferous deposits were generated by heat emanating from the centre of the Earth but activated by the heavenly bodies.

The German scientist Georgius Agricolahas with much justification been called the father of mineralogy. Of his seven geologic books, De natura fossilium(1546; “On Natural Fossils”) contains his major contributions to mineralogy and, in fact, has been called the first textbook on that subject. In Agricola’s time and well into the 19th century, “fossil” was a term that could be applied to any object dug from the Earth. Thus Agricola’s classification of fossils provided pigeonholes for organic remains, such as ammonites, and for rocks of various kinds in addition to minerals. Individual kinds of minerals, their associations and manners of occurrence, are described in detail, many for the first time.

With the birth of analytical chemistry toward the latter part of the 18th century, the classification of minerals on the basis of their composition at last became possible. The German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner was one of those who favoured a chemical classification in preference to a “natural history” classification based on external appearances. His list of several classifications, published posthumously, recognized 317 different substances ordered in four classes.

Paleontologyand stratigraphy

During the 17th century the guiding principles of paleontology and historical geology began to emerge in the work of a few individuals. Nicolaus Steno, a Danish scientist and theologian, presented carefully reasoned arguments favouring the organic origin of what are now called fossils. Also, he elucidated three principles that made possible the reconstruction of certain kinds of geologic events in a chronological order. In his Canis carcariae dissectum caput(1667; “Dissected Head of a Dog Shark”), he concluded that large tongue-shaped objects found in the strata of Malta were the teeth of sharks, whose remains were buried beneath the seafloor and later raised out of the water to their present sites. This excursion into paleontology led Steno to confront a broader question. How can one solid body, such as a shark’s tooth, become embedded in another solid body, such as a layer of rock? He published his answers in 1669 in a paper entitled “De solido intra naturaliter contento dissertationis” (“A Preliminary Discourse Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Processes of Nature Within a Solid”). Steno cited evidence to show that when the hard parts of an organism are covered with sediment, it is they and not the aggregates of sediment that are firm. Consolidation of the sediment into rock may come later, and, if so, the original solid fossil becomes encased in solid rock. He recognized that sediments settle from fluids layer by layer to form strata that are originally continuous and nearly horizontal. His principle of superposition of strata states that in a sequence of strata, as originally laid down, any stratum is younger than the one on which it rests and older than the one that rests upon it.

In 1667 and 1668 the English physicist Robert Hooke read papers before the Royal Society in which he expressed many of the ideas contained in Steno’s works. Hooke argued for the organic nature of fossils. Elevation of beds containing marine fossils to mountainous heights he attributed to the work of earthquakes. Streams attacking these elevated tracts wear down the hills, fill depressions with sediment, and thus level out irregularities of the landscape.

Earth history according to Werner and James Hutton

The two major theories of the 18th century were the Neptunian and the Plutonian. The Neptunists, led by Werner and his students, maintained that the Earth was originally covered by a turbid ocean. The first sediments deposited over the irregular floor of this universal ocean formed the granite and other crystalline rocks. Then as the ocean began to subside, “Stratified” rocks were laid down in succession. The “Volcanic” rocks were the youngest; Neptunists took small account of volcanism and thought that lava was formed by the burning of coal deposits underground.

The Scottish scientist James Hutton, leader of the Plutonists, viewed the Earth as a dynamic body that functions as a heat machine. Streams wear down the continents and deposit their waste in the sea. Subterranean heat causes the outer part of the Earth to expand in places, uplifting the compacted marine sediments to form new continents. Hutton recognized that granite is an intrusive igneous rock and not a primitive sediment as the Neptunists claimed. Intrusive sills and dikes of igneous rock provide evidence for the driving force of subterranean heat. Hutton viewed great angular unconformities separating sedimentary sequences as evidence for past cycles of sedimentation, uplift, and erosion. His Theory of the Earth, published as an essay in 1788, was expanded to a two-volume work in 1795. John Playfair, a professor of natural philosophy, defended Hutton against the counterattacks of the Neptunists, and his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory (1802) is the clearest contemporary account of Plutonist theory.

Hydrologic sciences

The idea that there is a circulatory system within the Earth, by which seawater is conveyed to mountaintops and there discharged, persisted until early in the 18th century. Two questions left unresolved by this theory were acknowledged even by its advocates. How is seawater forced uphill? How is the salt lost in the process?

The rise of subterranean water

René Descartes supposed that the seawater diffused through subterranean channels into large caverns below the tops of mountains. The Jesuit philosopher Athanasius Kircherin his Mundus subterraneus (1664; “Subterranean World”) suggested that the tides pump seawater through hidden channels to points of outlet at springs. To explain the rise of subterranean water beneath mountains, the chemist Robert Plot appealed to the pressure of air, which forces water up the insides of mountains. The idea of a great subterranean sea connecting with the ocean and supplying it with water together with all springs and rivers was resurrected in 1695 in John Woodward’s Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies.

The French Huguenot Bernard Palissy maintained, to the contrary, that rainfall is the sole source of rivers and springs. In his Discours admirables (1580; Admirable Discourses) he described how rainwater falling on mountains enters cracks in the ground and flows down along these until, diverted by some obstruction, it flows out on the surface as springs. Palissy scorned the idea that seawater courses in veins to the tops of mountains. For this to be true, sea level would have to be higher than mountaintops—an impossibility. In his Discours Palissy suggested that water would rise above the level at which it was first encountered in a well provided the source of the groundwater came from a place higher than the bottom of the well. This is an early reference to conditions essential to the occurrence of artesian water, a popular subject among Italian hydrologists of the 17th and 18th centuries.

In the latter part of the 17th century, Pierre Perrault and Edmé Mariotte conducted hydrologic investigations in the basin of the Seine River that established that the local annual precipitation was more than ample to account for the annual runoff.

Evaporation from the sea

The question remained as to whether the amount of water evaporated from the sea is sufficient to account for the precipitation that feeds the streams. The English astronomer-mathematician Edmond Halley measured the rate of evaporation from pans of water exposed to the air during hot summer days. Assuming that this same rate would obtain for the Mediterranean, Halley calculated that some 5,280,000,000 tons of water are evaporated from this sea during a summer day. Assuming further that each of the nine major rivers flowing into the Mediterranean has a daily discharge 10 times that of the Thames, he calculated that a daily inflow of fresh water back into that sea would be 1,827,000,000 tons, only slightly more than a third of the amount lost by evaporation. Halley went on to explain what happens to the remainder. A part falls back into the sea as rain before it reaches land. Another part is taken up by plants.

In the course of the hydrologic cycle, Halley reasoned, the rivers constantly bring salt into the sea in solution, but the salt is left behind when seawater evaporates to replenish the streams with rainwater. Thus the sea must be growing steadily saltier.

Atmospheric sciences
Water vapour in the atmosphere

After 1760 the analytical chemists at last demonstrated that water and air are not the same substance in different guises. Long before this development, however, investigators had begun to draw a distinction between water vapour and air. Otto von Guericke, a German physicist and engineer, produced artificial clouds by releasing air from one flask into another one from which the air had been evacuated. A fog then formed in the unevacuated flask. Guericke concluded that air cannot be turned into water, though moisture can enter the air and later be condensed into water. Guericke’s experiments, however, did not answer the question as to how water enters the atmosphere as vapour. In “Les Météores”(“Meteorology,” an essay published in the book Discours de la methodein 1637), Descartes envisioned water as composed of minute particles that were elongate, smooth, and separated by a highly rarified “subtle matter.”

The same uncertainty as to how water gets into the air surrounded the question as to how it remains suspended as clouds. A popular view in the 18th century was that clouds are made of countless tiny bubbles that float in air. Guericke had suggested that the fine particles in his artificial clouds were bubbles. Other observers professed to have seen bubble-shaped particles of water vapour rising from warm water or hot coffee.

Pressure, temperature, and atmospheric circulation


The fact that Lambert could appeal to changes in air pressure to explain circulation reflects an important change from the view still current in the late 16th century that air is weightless. This misconception was corrected after 1643 with the invention of the mercury barometer. It was soon discovered that the height of the barometer varied with the weather, usually standing at its highest during clear weather and falling to the lowest on rainy days.

Toward the end of the 18th century it was beginning to be understood that variations in the barometer must be related to the general motion and circulation of the atmosphere. That these variations could not be due solely to changes in humidity was the conclusion of the Swiss scientist Horace Bénédict de Saussure in his Essais sur l’hygrométrie (1783; “Essay on Hygrometry”). From experiments with changes of water vapour and pressure in air enclosed in a glass globe, Saussure concluded that changes in temperature must be immediately responsible for variations of the barometer and that these in turn must be related to the movement of air from one place to another.

The 19th century
Geologic sciences
Crystallography and the classification of minerals and rocks

The French scientist René-Just Häuy, whose treatises on mineralogy and crystallography appeared in 1801 and 1822, respectively, has been credited with advancing mineralogy to the status of a science and with establishing the science of crystallography. From his studies of the geometric relationships between planes of cleavage, he concluded that the ultimate particles forming a given species of mineral have the same shape and that variations in crystal habit reflect differences in the ways identical molecules are put together. In 1814 Jöns Jacob Berzeliusof Sweden published a system of mineralogy offering a comprehensive classification of minerals based on their chemistry. Berzelius recognized silica as an acid and introduced into mineralogy the group known as silicates. At mid-century the American geologist James Dwight Dana’sSystem of Mineralogy, in its third edition, was reorganized around a chemical classification, which thereafter became standard for handbooks.

The development of the polarizing microscope and the technique for grinding sections of rocks so thin as to be virtually transparent came in 1827 from studies of fossilized wood by William Nicol. In 1849 Clifton Sorby showed that minerals viewed in thin section could be identified by their optical properties, and soon afterward improved classifications of rocks were made on the basis of their mineralogic composition. The German geologist Ferdinand Zirkel’s Mikroscopische Beschaffenheit der Mineralien und Gesteine (1873; “The Microscopic Nature of Minerals and Rocks”) contains one of the first mineralogic classifications of rocks and marks the emergence of microscopic petrography as an established branch of science.

William Smith and faunal succession

In 1683 the zoologist Martin Lister proposed to the Royal Society that a new sort of map be drawn showing the areal distribution of the different kinds of British “soiles” (vegetable soils and underlying bedrock). The work proposed by Lister was not accomplished until 132 years later, when William Smith published his Geologic Map of England and Wales with Part of Scotland (1815). A self-educated surveyor and engineer, Smith had the habit of collecting fossils and making careful note of the strata that contained them. He discovered that the different stratified formations in England contain distinctive assemblages of fossils. His map, reproduced on a scale of five miles to the inch, showed 20 different rock units, to which Smith applied local names in common use—e.g., London Clay and Purbeck Beds. In 1816 Smith published a companion work, Strata Identified by Organized Fossils, in which the organic remains characteristic of each of his rock units were illustrated. His generalization that each formation is “possessed of properties peculiar to itself [and] has the same organized fossils throughout its course” is the first clear statement of the principle of faunal sequence, which is the basis for worldwide correlation of fossiliferous strata into a coherent system. Smith thus demonstrated two kinds of order in nature: order in the spatial arrangement of rock units and order in the succession of ancient forms of life.

Smith’s principle of faunal sequence was another way of saying that there are discontinuities in the sequences of fossilized plants and animals. These discontinuities were interpreted in two ways: as indicators of episodic destruction of life or as evidence for the incompleteness of the fossil record. Baron Georges Cuvier of France was one of the more distinguished members of a large group of naturalists who believed that paleontological discontinuities bore witness to sudden and widespread catastrophes. Cuvier’s skill at comparative anatomy enabled him to reconstruct from fragmentary remains the skeletons of large vertebrate animals found at different levels in the Cenozoic sequence of northern France. From these studies he discovered that the fossils in all but the youngest deposits belong to species now extinct. Moreover, these extinct species have definite ranges up and down in the stratigraphic column. Cuvier inferred that the successive extinctions were the result of convulsions that caused the strata of the continents to be dislocated and folded and the seas to sweep across the continents and just as suddenly subside.

Charles Lyell and uniformitarianism

In opposition to the catastrophist school of thought, the British geologist Charles Lyell proposed a uniformitarian interpretation of geologic history in his Principles of Geology (3 vols., 1830–33). His system was based on two propositions: the causes of geologic change operating include all the causes that have acted from the earliest time; and these causes have always operated at the same average levels of energy. These two propositions add up to a “steady-state” theory of the Earth. Changes in climate have fluctuated around a mean, reflecting changes in the position of land and sea. Progress through time in the organic world is likewise an illusion, the effect of an imperfect paleontological record. The main part of the Principles was devoted less to theory than to procedures for inferring events from rocks; and for Lyell’s clear exposition of methodology his work was highly regarded throughout its many editions, long after the author himself had abandoned antiprogressivist views on the development of life.

Louis Agassiz and the ice age

Huge boulders of granite resting upon limestone of the Jura Mountains were subjects of controversy during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Saussure described these in 1779 and called them erratics. He concluded that they had been swept to their present positions by torrents of water. Saussure’s interpretation was in accord with the tenets of diluvial geologists, who interpreted erratics and sheets of unstratified sediment (till or drift) spread over the northern parts of Europe and North America as the work of the “Deluge.”

In 1837 the Swiss zoologist and paleontologist Louis Agassiz delivered a startling address before the Helvetian Society, proposing that, during a geologically recent stage of refrigeration, glacial ice had covered Eurasia from the North Pole to the shores of the Mediterranean and Caspian. Wherever erratics, till, and striated pavements of rock occur, sure evidence of this recent catastrophe exists. The reception accorded this address was glacial, too, and Alexander von Humboldt advised Agassiz to return to his fossil fishes. Instead, he began intensive field studies and in 1840 published his Études sur les glaciers (“Studies of Glaciers”), demonstrating that Alpine glaciers had been far more extensive in the past. That same year he visited the British Isles in the company of Buckland and extended the glacial doctrine to Scotland, northern England, and Ireland. In 1846 he carried his campaign to North America and there found additional evidence for an ice age.

Geologic time and the age of the Earth

By mid-century the fossiliferous strata of Europe had been grouped into systems arrayed in chronological order. The stratigraphic column, a composite of these systems, was pieced together from exposures in different regions by application of the principles of superposition and faunal sequence. Time elapsed during the formation of a system became known as a period, and the periods were grouped into eras: the Paleozoic (Cambrian through Permian periods), Mesozoic (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods), and Cenozoic (Tertiary and Quaternary periods).

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) offered a theoretical explanation for the empirical principle of faunal sequence. The fossils of the successive systems are different not only because parts of the stratigraphic record are missing but also because most species have lost in their struggles for survival and also because those that do survive evolve into new forms over time. Darwin borrowed two ideas from Lyell and the uniformitarians: the idea that geologic time is virtually without limit and the idea that a sequence of minute changes integrated over long periods of time produce remarkable changes in natural entities.

The evolutionists and the historical geologists were embarrassed when, beginning in 1864, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) attacked the steady-state theory of the Earth and placed numerical strictures on the length of geologic time. The Earth might function as a heat machine, but it could not also be a perpetual motion machine. Assuming that the Earth was originally molten, Thomson calculated that not less than 20,000,000 and not more than 400,000,000 years could have passed since the Earth first became a solid body. Other physicists of note put even narrower limits on the Earth’s age ranging down to 15,000,000 or 20,000,000 years. All these calculations, however, were based on the common assumption, not always explicitly stated, that the Earth’s substance is inert and hence incapable of generating new heat. Shortly before the end of the century this assumption was negated by the discovery of radioactive elements that disintegrate spontaneously and release heat to the Earth in the process.

Concepts of landform evolution

The scientific exploration of the American West following the end of the Civil War yielded much new information on the sculpture of the landscape by streams. John Wesley Powellin his reports on the Colorado River and Uinta Mountains (1875, 1876) explained how streams may come to flow across mountain ranges rather than detour around them. The Green River does not follow some structural crack in its gorge across the Uinta Mountains; instead it has cut its canyon as the mountain range was slowly bowed up. Given enough time, streams will erode their drainage basins to plains approaching sea level as a base. Grove Karl Gilbert’s Report on the Geology of the Henry Mountains (1877) offered a detailed analysis of fluvial processes. According to Gilbert all streams work toward a graded condition, a state of dynamic equilibrium that is attained when the net effect of the flowing water is neither erosion of the bed nor deposition of sediment, when the landscape reflects a balance between the resistance of the rocks to erosion and the processes that are operative upon them. After 1884 William Morris Davis developed the concept of the geographical cycle, during which elevated regions pass through successive stages of dissection and denudation characterized as youthful, mature, and old. Youthful landscapes have broad divides and narrow valleys. With further denudation the original surface on which the streams began their work is reduced to ridgetops. Finally in the stage of old age, the region is reduced to a nearly featureless plain near sea level or its inland projection. Uplift of the region in any stage of this evolution will activate a new cycle. Davis’ views dominated geomorphic thought until well into the 20th century, when quantitative approaches resulted in the rediscovery of Gilbert’s ideas.

Gravity, isostasy, and the Earth’s figure

Discoveries of regional anomalies in the Earth’s gravity led to the realization that high mountain ranges have underlying deficiencies in mass about equal to the apparent surface loads represented by the mountains themselves. In the 18th century the French scientist Pierre Bouguer had observed that the deflections of the pendulum in Peru are much less than they should be if the Andes represent a load perched on top of the Earth’s crust. Similar anomalies were later found to obtain along the Himalayan front. To explain these anomalies it was necessary to assume that beneath some depth within the Earth pressures are hydrostatic (equal on all sides). If excess loads are placed upon the crust, as by addition of a continental ice cap, the crust will sink to compensate for the additional mass and will rise again when the load is removed. The tendency toward general equilibrium maintained through vertical movements of the Earth’s outer layers was called isostasy in 1899 by Clarence Edward Dutton of the United States.

Evidence for substantial vertical movements of the crust was supplied by studies of regional stratigraphy. In 1883 another American geologist, James Hall, had demonstrated that Paleozoic rocks of the folded Appalachians were several times as thick as sequences of the same age in the plateaus and plains to the west. It was his conclusion that the folded strata in the mountains must have accumulated in a linear submarine trough that filled with sediment as it subsided. Downward crustal flexures of this magnitude came to be called geosynclines.

Hydrologic sciences
Darcy’s law

Quantitative studies of the movement of water in streams and aquifers led to the formulation of mathematical statements relating discharge to other factors. Henri-Philibert-Gaspard Darcy, a French hydraulic engineer, was the first to state clearly a law describing the flow of groundwater. Darcy’s experiments, reported in 1856, were based on the ideas that an aquifer is analogous to a main line connecting two reservoirs at different levels and that an artesian well is like a pipe drawing water from a main line under pressure. His investigations of flow through stratified beds of sand led him to conclude that the rate of flow is directly proportional to the energy loss and inversely proportional to the length of the path of flow. Another French engineer, Arsène-Jules-Étienne-Juvénal Dupuit, extended Darcy’s work and developed equations for underground flow toward a well, for the recharge of aquifers, and for the discharge of artesian wells. Philip Forchheimer, an Austrian hydrologist, introduced the theory of functions of a complex variable to analyze the flow by gravity of underground water toward wells and developed equations for determining the critical distance between a river and a well beyond which water from the river will not move into the well.

Surface water discharge

A complicated empirical formula for the discharge of streams resulted from the studies of Andrew Atkinson Humphreys and Henry Larcom Abbot in the course of the Mississippi Delta Survey of 1851–60. Their formula contained no term for roughness of channel and on this and other grounds was later found to be inapplicable to the rapidly flowing streams of mountainous regions. In 1869 Emile-Oscar Ganguillet and Rudolph Kutter developed a more generally applicable discharge equation following their studies of flow in Swiss mountain streams. Toward the end of the century, systematic studies of the discharge of streams had become common. In the United States the Geological Survey, following its establishment in 1879, became the principal agency for collecting and publishing data on discharge, and by 1906 stream gauging had become nationwide.

Foundations of oceanography

In 1807 Thomas Jefferson ordered the establishment of the U.S. Coast Survey (later Coast and Geodetic Survey and now the National Ocean Survey). Modeled after British and French agencies that had grown up in the 1700s, the agency was charged with the responsibilities of hydrographic and geodetic surveying, studies of tides, and preparation of charts. Beginning in 1842 the U.S. Navy undertook expansive oceanographic operations through its office of charts and instruments. Lieut. Matthew Fontaine Maury promoted international cooperation in gathering meteorologic and hydrologic data at sea. In 1847 Maury compiled the first wind and current charts for the North Atlantic and in 1854 issued the first depth map to 4,000 fathoms (7,300 metres). His Physical Geography of the Sea (1855) is generally considered the first oceanographic textbook.

The voyage of the Beagle(1831–36) is remembered for Darwin’s biological and geologic contributions. From his observations in the South Pacific, Darwin formulated a theory for the origin of coral reefs, which with minor changes has stood the test of time. He viewed the fringing reefs, barrier reefs, and atolls as successive stages in a developmental sequence. The volcanic islands around which the reef-building organisms are attached slowly sink, but at the same time the shallow-water organisms that form the reefs build their colonies upward so as to remain in the sunlit layers of water. With submergence of the island, what began as a fringing reef girdling a landmass at last becomes an atoll enclosing a lagoon.

Laying telegraphic cables across the Atlantic called for investigations of the configuration of the ocean floor, of the currents that sweep the bottom, and of the benthonic animals that might damage the cables. The explorations of the British ships Lightning and Porcupine in 1868 and 1869 turned up surprising oceanographic information. Following closely upon these voyages, the Challenger was authorized to determine “the conditions of the Deep Sea throughout the Great Ocean Basins.”

The Challenger left port in December of 1872 and returned in May 1876, after logging 127,600 kilometres (68,890 nautical miles). Under the direction of Wyville Thomson, Scottish professor of natural history, it occupied 350 stations scattered over all oceans except the Arctic. The work involved in analyzing the information gathered during the expedition was completed by Thomson’s shipmate Sir John Murray, and the results filled 50 large volumes. Hundreds of new species of marine organisms were described, including new forms of life from deep waters. The temperature of water at the bottom of the oceans was found to be nearly constant below the 2,000-fathom level, averaging about 2.5° C (36.5° F) in the North Atlantic and 2° C (35° F) in the North Pacific. Soundings showed wide variations in depths of water, and from the dredgings of the bottom came new types of sediment—red clay as well as oozes made predominantly of the minute skeletons of foraminifera, radiolarians, or diatoms. Improved charts of the principal surface currents were produced, and the precise location of many oceanic islands was determined for the first time. Seventy-seven samples of seawater were taken at different stations from depths ranging downward to about 1.5 kilometres. The German-born chemist Wilhelm Dittmar conducted quantitative determinations of the seven major constituents (other than the hydrogen and oxygen of the water itself)—namely, sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, chloride, bromide, and sulfate. Surprisingly, the percentages of these components turned out to be nearly the same in all samples.

Efforts to analyze the rise and fall of the tides in mathematical terms reflecting the relative and constantly changing positions of Earth, Moon, and Sun, and thus to predict the tides at particular localities, has never been entirely successful because of local variations in configuration of shore and seafloor. Nevertheless, harmonic tidal analysis gives essential first approximations that are essential to tidal prediction. In 1884 a mechanical analog tidal prediction device was invented by William Ferrel of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and improved models were used until 1965, when the work of the analog machines was taken over by electronic computers.

Atmospheric sciences
Composition of the atmosphere

Studies of barometric pressure by the British chemist and physicist John Dalton led him to conclude that evaporation and condensation of vapour do not involve chemical transformations. The introduction of vapour into the air by evaporation must change the average specific gravity of the air column and, without altering the height of that column, will change the reading of the barometer. In 1857 Rudolf Clausius, a German physicist, clarified the mechanics of evaporation in his kinetic theory of gases. Evaporation occurs when more molecules of a liquid are leaving its surface than returning to it, and the higher the temperature the more of these escaped molecules will be in space at any one time.

Following the invention of the hot-air balloon by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, balloonists produced some useful information on the composition and movements of the atmosphere. In 1804 the celebrated French chemist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac ascended to about 7,000 metres, took samples of air, and later determined that the rarefied air at that altitude contained the same percentage of oxygen (21.49 percent) as the air on the ground. Austrian meteorologist Julius von Hann, working with data from balloon ascents and climbing in the Alps and Himalayas, concluded in 1874 that about 90 percent of all the water vapour in the atmosphere is concentrated below 6,000 metres—from which it follows that high mountains can be barriers against the transport of water vapour.

Understanding of clouds, fog, and dew


After Guericke’s experiments it was widely believed that water vapour condenses into cloud as soon as the air containing it cools to the dew point. That this is not necessarily so was proved by Paul-Jean Coulier of France from experiments reported in 1875. Coulier found that the sudden expansion of air in glass flasks failed to produce an artificial cloud if the air in the system was filtered through cotton wool. He concluded that dust in the air was essential to the formation of cloud in the flask.

From about the mid-1820s, efforts were made to classify precipitation in terms of the causes behind the lowering of temperature. In 1841 the American astronomer-meteorologist Elias Loomis recognized the following causes: warm air coming into contact with cold earth or water, responsible for fog; mixing of warm and cold currents, which commonly results in light rains; and sudden transport of air into high regions, as by flow up a mountain slope or by warm currents riding over an opposing current of cold air, which may produce heavy rains.

Observation and study of storms

Storms, particularly tropical revolving storms, were subjects of much interest. As early as 1697 some of the more spectacular features of revolving storms were recorded in William Dampier’sNew Voyage Round the World. On July 4, 1687, Dampier’s ship survived the passage of what he called a “tuffoon” off the coast of China. The captain’s vivid account of this experience clearly describes the calm central eye of the storm and the passage of winds from opposite directions as the storm moved past. In 1828 Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, a Prussian meteorologist, recognized that tropical revolving storms are traveling systems with strong winds moving counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. The whirlwind character of these storms was independently established by the American meteorologist William C. Redfield in the case of the September hurricane that struck New England in 1821. He noted that in central Connecticut the trees had been toppled toward the northwest, whereas some 80 kilometres westward they had fallen in the opposite direction. Redfield identified the belt between the Equator and the tropics as the region in which hurricanes are generated, and he recognized how the tracks of these storms tend to veer eastward when they enter the belt of westerly winds at about latitude 30° N. In 1849 Sir William Reid, a British meteorologist and military engineer, studied the revolving storms that occur south of the Equator in the Indian Ocean and confirmed that they have reversed rotations and curvatures of path compared with those of the Northern Hemisphere. Capt. Henry Piddington subsequently investigated revolving storms affecting the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea, and in 1855 he named these cyclones in his Sailor’s Horn-book for the Laws of Storms in all Parts of the World.

Beginning in 1835 James Pollard Espy, an American meteorologist, began extensive studies of storms from which he developed a theory to explain their sources of energy. Radially convergent winds, he believed, cause the air to rise in their area of collision. Upward movement of moist air is attended by condensation and precipitation. Latent heat released through the change of vapour to cloud or water causes further expansion and rising of the air. The higher the moist air rises the more the equilibrium of the system is disturbed, and this equilibrium cannot be restored until moist air at the surface ceases to flow toward the ascending column.

That radially convergent winds are not necessary to the rising of large air masses was demonstrated by Loomis in the case of a great storm that passed across the northeastern United States in December 1836. From his studies of wind patterns, changes of temperature, and changes in barometric pressure, he concluded that a cold northwest wind had displaced a wind blowing from the southeast by flowing under it. The southeast wind made its escape by ascending from the Earth’s surface. Loomis had recognized what today would be called a frontal surface.

Weather and climate






The 20th century: modern trends and developments
Geologic sciences



Radiometric dating

In 1905, shortly after the discovery of radioactivity, the American chemist Bertram Boltwood suggested that lead is one of the disintegration products of uranium, in which case the older a uranium-bearing mineral the greater should be its proportional part of lead. Analyzing specimens whose relative geologic ages were known, Boltwood found that the ratio of lead to uranium did indeed increase with age. After estimating the rate of this radioactive change he calculated that the absolute ages of his specimens ranged from 410,000,000 to 2,200,000,000 years. Though his figures were too high by about 20 percent, their order of magnitude was enough to dispose of the short scale of geologic time proposed by Lord Kelvin.

Versions of the modern mass spectrometer were invented in the early 1920s and 1930s, and during World War II the device was improved substantially to help in the development of the atomic bomb. Soon after the war, Harold C. Urey and G.J. Wasserburg applied the mass spectrometer to the study of geochronology. This device separates the different isotopes of the same element and can measure the variations in these isotopic abundances to within one part in 10,000. By determining the amount of the parent and daughter isotopes present in a sample and by knowing their rate of radioactive decay (each radioisotope has its own decay constant), the isotopic age of the sample can be calculated. For dating minerals and rocks, investigators commonly use the following couplets of parent and daughter isotopes: thorium-232–lead-208, uranium-235–lead-207, samarium-147–neodymium-143, rubidium-87–strontium-87, potassium-40–argon-40, and argon-40–argon-39. The SHRIMP (Sensitive High “Mass” is not part of this acronym according to sources #1 and 2 (as well as many other non-cited internet sources). (AA 2/1/07) Resolution Ion Microprobe) enables the accurate determination of the uranium-lead age of the mineral zircon, and this has revolutionized the understanding of the isotopic age of formation of zircon-bearing igneous granitic rocks. Another technological development is the ICP-MS (Inductively Coupled”Plasma” should be included here so as to make the acronym work (and per sources #3, 4). (AA 2/1/07) Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer), which is able to provide the isotopic age of the minerals zircon, titanite, rutile, and monazite. These minerals are common to many igneous and metamorphic rocks.

Such techniques have had an enormous impact on scientific knowledge of Earth history because precise dates can now be obtained on rocks in all orogenic (mountain) belts ranging in age from the early Archean (about 3,800,000,000 years old) to the late Tertiary (roughly 20,000,000 years old). The oldest sedimentary and volcanic rocks in the world are found at Isua in western Greenland; they have an isotopic age of approximately 3,800,000,000 years—a fact first established in 1972 by Stephen Moorbath of the University of Oxford. The oldest rocks on Earth are highly recrystallized granites (tonalitic gneisses from the Acasta River area in northwestern Canada), which Sam Bowring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown have an isotopic age of Actually, the age of this rock is given as a range with 4,030,000,000 years given as the oldest rock in the study (source #6). (AA 2/1/07)4,030,000,000 years. known rocks on Earth, estimated at 4,280,000,000 years old, are the faux amphibolite volcanic deposits of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt in Quebec, Canada. A radiometric dating technique that measures the ratio of the rare-earth elements neodymium and samarium present in a rock sample was used to produce the estimate. Also by extrapolating backward in time to a situation when there was no lead that had been produced by radiogenic processes, a figure of about 4,600,000,000 years is obtained for the minimum age of the Earth. This figure is of the same order as ages obtained for certain meteorites and lunar rocks.

Experimental study of rocks

Experimental petrology began with the work of Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff, one of the founders of physical chemistry. Between 1896 and 1908 he elucidated the complex sequence of chemical reactions attending the precipitation of salts (evaporites) from the evaporation of seawater. Van’t Hoff’s aim was to explain the succession of mineral salts present in Permian rocks of Germany. His success at producing from aqueous solutions artificial minerals and rocks like those found in natural salt deposits stimulated studies of minerals crystallizing from silicate melts simulating the magmas from which igneous rocks have formed. Working at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., Norman L. Bowen conducted extensive phase-equilibrium studies of silicate systems, brought together in his Evolution of the Igneous Rocks (1928). Experimental petrology, both at the low-temperature range explored by van’t Hoff and in the high ranges of temperature investigated by Bowen, continues to provide laboratory evidence for interpreting the chemical history of sedimentary and igneous rocks. Experimental petrology also provides valuable data on the stability limits of individual metamorphic minerals and of the reactions between different minerals in a wide variety of chemical systems. These experiments are carried out at elevated temperatures and pressures that simulate those operating in different levels of the Earth’s crust. Thus the metamorphic petrologist today can compare the minerals and mineral assemblages found in natural rocks with comparable examples produced in the laboratory, the pressure–temperature limits of which have been well defined by experimental petrology.

Another branch of experimental science relates to the deformation of rocks. In 1906 the American physicist P.W. Bridgman developed a technique for subjecting rock samples to high pressures similar to those deep in the Earth. Studies of the behaviour of rocks in the laboratory have shown that their strength increases with confining pressure but decreases with rise in temperature. Down to depths of a few kilometres the strength of rocks would be expected to increase. At greater depths the temperature effect should become dominant, and response to stress should result in flow rather than fracture of rocks. In 1959 two American geologists, Marion King Hubbertand William W. Rubey, demonstrated that fluids in the pores of rock may reduce internal friction and permit gliding over nearly horizontal planes of the large overthrust blocks associated with folded mountains. More recently the Norwegian petrologist Hans Ramberg performed many experiments with a large centrifuge that produced a negative gravity effect and thus was able to create structures simulating salt domes, which rise because of the relatively low density of the salt in comparison with that of surrounding rocks. With all these deformation experiments, it is necessary to scale down as precisely as possible variables such as the time and velocity of the experiment and the viscosity and temperature of the material from the natural to the laboratory conditions.


In the 19th century crystallographers were only able to study the external form of minerals, and it was not until 1895 when the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X rays that it became possible to consider their internal structure. In 1912 another German physicist, Max von Laue, realized that X rays were scattered and deflected at regular angles when they passed through a copper sulfate crystal, and so he produced the first X-ray diffraction pattern on a photographic film. A year later William Bragg of Britain and his son Lawrence perceived that such a pattern reflects the layers of atoms in the crystal structure, and they succeeded in determining for the first time the atomic crystal structure of the mineral halite (sodium chloride). These discoveries had a long-lasting influence on crystallography because they led to the development of the X-ray powder diffractometer, which is now widely used to identify minerals and to ascertain their crystal structure.

The chemical analysis of rocks and minerals

Advanced analytic chemical equipment has revolutionized the understanding of the composition of rocks and minerals. For example, the XRF (X-Ray FluorescenceTechnically, “Spectrometer” isn’t part of this acronym, so should we remove it? As far as I can tell, XRF only stands for X-Ray Fluorescence, although a spectrometer is used (source #7) . (AA 2/1/07)) spectrometer can quantify the major and trace element abundances of many chemical elements in a rock sample down to parts-per-million concentrations. This geochemical method has been used to differentiate successive stages of igneous rocks in the plate-tectonic cycle. The metamorphic petrologist can use the bulk composition of a recrystallized rock to define the structure of the original rock, assuming that no structural change has occurred during the metamorphic process. Next, the electron microprobe bombards a thin microscopic slice of a mineral in a sample with a beam of electrons, which can determine the chemical composition of the mineral almost instantly. This method has wide applications in, for example, the fields of industrial mineralogy, materials science, igneous geochemistry, and metamorphic petrology.


Microscopic fossils, such as ostracods, foraminifera, and pollen grains, are common in sediments of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras (from about 250,000,000 years ago to the present). Because the rock chips brought up in oil wells are so small, a high-resolution instrument known as a scanning electron microscope had to be developed to study the microfossils. The classification of microfossils of organisms that lived within relatively short time spans has enabled Mesozoic-Cenozoic sediments to be subdivided in remarkable detail. This technique also has had a major impact on the study of Precambrian life (i.e., organisms that existed more than The following should be 542,000,000 as per the new stratigraphic chart from 2004 (and source #9). (AA 2/1/07)542,000,000 years ago). Carbonaceous spheroids and filaments about 7–10 millimetres (0.3–0.4 inch) long are recorded in 3,500,000,000-year-old sediments in the Pilbara region of northwestern Western Australia and in the lower Onverwacht Series of the Barberton belt in South Africa; these are the oldest reliable records of life on Earth.

Seismology and the structure of the Earth

Earthquake study was institutionalized in 1880 with the formation of the Seismological Society of Japan under the leadership of the English geologist John Milne. Milne and his associates invented the first accurate seismographs, including the instrument later known as the Milne seismograph. Seismology has revealed much about the structure of the Earth’s core, mantle, and crust. The English seismologist Richard Dixon Oldham’s studies of earthquake records in 1906 led to the discovery of the Earth’s core. From studies of the Croatian quake of Oct. 8, 1909, the geophysicist Andrija Mohorovičićdiscovered the discontinuity (often called the Moho) that separates the crust from the underlying mantle.

Today there are more than 1,000 seismograph stations around the world, and their data are used to compile seismicity maps. These maps show that earthquake epicentres are aligned in narrow, continuous belts along the boundaries of lithospheric plates (see below). The earthquake foci outline the mid-oceanic ridges in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans where the plates separate, while around the margins of the Pacific where the plates converge, they lie in a dipping plane, or Benioff zone, that defines the position of the subducting plate boundary to depths of about 700 kilometres.

Since 1950, additional information on the crust has been obtained from the analysis of artificial tremors produced by chemical explosions. These studies have shown that the Moho is present under all continents at an average depth of 35 kilometres and that the crust above it thickens under young mountain ranges to depths of 70 kilometres in the Andes and the Himalayas. In such investigations the reflections of the seismic waves generated from a series of “shot” points are also recorded, and this makes it possible to construct a profile of the subsurface structure. This is seismic reflection profiling, the main method of exploration used by the petroleum industry. During the late 1970s, a new technique for generating seismic waves was invented: thumping and vibrating the surface of the ground with a gas-propelled piston from a large truck.

The theory of plate tectonics

Plate tectonics has revolutionized virtually every discipline of the Earth sciences since the late 1960s and early 1970s. It has served as a unifying model or paradigm for explaining geologic phenomena that were formerly considered in unrelated fashion. Plate tectonics describes seismic activity, volcanism, mountain building, and various other Earth processes in terms of the structure and mechanical behaviour of a small number of enormous rigid plates thought to constitute the outer part of the planet (i.e., the lithosphere). This all-encompassing theory grew out of observations and ideas about continental drift and seafloor spreading.

In 1912 the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that throughout most of geologic time there was only one continental mass, which he named Pangea. At some time during the Mesozoic Era, Pangaea fragmented and the parts began to drift apart. Westward drift of the Americas opened the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian block drifted across the Equator to join with Asia. In 1937 the South African Alexander Du Toit modified Wegener’s hypothesis by suggesting the existence of two primordial continents: Laurasia in the north and Gondwanaland in the south. Aside from the congruency of continental shelf margins across the Atlantic, proponents of continental drift have amassed impressive geologic evidence to support their views. Similarities in fossil terrestrial organisms in pre-Cretaceous (older than about 145,000,000 years) strata of Africa and South America and in pre-Jurassic rocks (older than about 200,000,000 years) of Australia, India, Madagascar, and Africa are explained if these continents were formerly connected but difficult to account for otherwise. Fitting the Americas with the continents across the Atlantic brings together similar kinds of rocks and structures. Evidence of widespread glaciation during the Upper Paleozoic is found in Antarctica, southern South America, southern Africa, India, and Australia. If these continents were formerly united around the south polar region, this glaciation becomes explicable as a unified sequence of events in time and space.

Interest in continental drift heightened during the 1950s as knowledge of the Earth’s magnetic field during the geologic past developed from the studies of Stanley K. Runcorn, Patrick M.S. Blackett, and others. Ferromagnetic minerals such as magnetite acquire a permanent magnetization when they crystallize as components of igneous rock. The direction of their magnetization is the same as the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field at the place and time of crystallization. Particles of magnetized minerals released from their parent igneous rocks by weathering may later realign themselves with the existing magnetic field at the time these particles are incorporated into sedimentary deposits. Studies of the remanent magnetism in suitable rocks of different ages from over the world indicate that the magnetic poles were in different places at different times. The polar wandering curves are different for the several continents, but in important instances these differences are reconciled on the assumption that continents now separated were formerly joined. The curves for Europe and North America, for example, are reconciled by the assumption that America has drifted about 30° westward relative to Europe since the Triassic Period (approximately 200,000,000 to 250,000,000 years ago).

In the early 1960s a major breakthrough in understanding the way the modern Earth works came from two studies of the ocean floor. First, the American geophysicists Harry H. Hess and Robert S. Dietz suggested that new ocean crust was formed along mid-oceanic ridges between separating continents; and second, Drummond H. Matthews and Frederick J. Vine of Britain proposed that the new oceanic crust acted like a magnetic tape recorder insofar as magnetic anomaly strips parallel to the ridge had been magnetized alternately in normal and reversed order, reflecting the changes in polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field. This theory of seafloor spreading then needed testing, and the opportunity arose from major advances in deep-water drilling technology. The Joint Oceanographic Institutions Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) project began in 1969, continued with the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), and, since 1976, with the International Phase of Ocean Drilling (IPOD) project. These projects have produced more than 500 boreholes in the floor of the world’s oceans, and the results have been as outstanding as the plate-tectonic theory itself. They confirm that the oceanic crust is everywhere younger than about 200,000,000 years and that the stratigraphic age determined by micropaleontology of the overlying oceanic sediments is close to the age of the oceanic crust calculated from the magnetic anomalies.

The plate-tectonic theory, which embraces both continental drift and seafloor spreading, was formulated in the mid-1960s by the Canadian geologist J. Tuzo Wilson, who described the network of mid-oceanic ridges, transform faults, and subduction zones as boundaries separating an evolving mosaic of enormous plates, and who proposed the idea of the opening and closing of oceans and eventual production of an orogenic belt by the collision of two continents.

Up to this point, no one had considered in any detail the implications of the plate-tectonic theory for the evolution of continental orogenic belts; most thought had been devoted to the oceans. In 1969 John Dewey of the University of Cambridge outlined an analysis of the Caledonian-Appalachian orogenic belts in terms of a complete plate-tectonic cycle of events, and this provided a model for the interpretation of other pre-Mesozoic (Paleozoic and Precambrian) belts. Even the oldest volcano-sedimentary rocks on Earth, in the Source #11 mentions that there are rocks from this area that date from 3.85 Ga, but most sources stick with our original date of 3.8 Ga (such as source #12). I’m not sure if this requires a re-write, but it should be mentioned. If our reviewer says it’s 3.85 Ga, it’s good enough for me. (AA 2/1/07)3,800,000,000 year-old Isua belt in West Greenland, have been shown by geologists from the Tokyo Institute of Technology to have formed in a plate tectonic setting, i.e., in a trench or mouth of a subduction zone. For a detailed discussion of plate-tectonic theory and its far-reaching effects, see plate tectonics.

Hydrologic sciences
Water resources and seawater chemistry

Quantitative studies of the distribution of water have revealed that an astonishingly small part of the Earth’s water is contained in lakes and rivers. Ninety-seven percent of all the water is in the oceans; and, of the fresh water constituting the remainder, three-fourths is locked up in glacial ice and most of the rest is in the ground. Approximate figures are also now available for the amounts of water involved in the different stages of the hydrologic cycle. Of the 859 millimetres of annual global precipitation, 23 percent falls on the lands; but only about a third of the precipitation on the lands runs directly back to the sea, the remainder being recycled through the atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration. Subsurface groundwater accumulates by infiltration of rainwater into soil and bedrock. Some may run off into rivers and lakes, and some may reemerge as springs or aquifers. Advanced techniques are used extensively in groundwater studies nowadays. The rate of groundwater flow, for example, can be calculated from the breakdown of radioactive carbon-14 by measuring the time it takes for rainwater to pass through the ground, while numerical modeling is used to study heat and mass transfer in groundwater. High-precision equipment is used for measuring down-hole temperature, pressure, flow rate, and water level. Groundwater hydrology is important in studies of fractured reservoirs, subsidence resulting from fluid withdrawal, geothermal resource exploration, radioactive waste disposal, and aquifer thermal-energy storage.

Chemical analyses of trace elements and isotopes of seawater are conducted as part of the Geochemical Ocean Sections (Geosecs) program. Of the 92 naturally occurring elements, nearly 80 have been detected in seawater or in the organisms that inhabit it, and it is thought to be only a matter of time until traces of the others are detected. Contrary to the idea widely circulated in the older literature of oceanography, that the relative proportions of the oceans’ dissolved constituents are constant, investigations since 1962 have revealed statistically significant variations in the ratios of calcium and strontium to chlorinity. The role of organisms as influences on the composition of seawater has become better understood with advances in marine biology. It is now known that plants and animals may collect certain elements to concentrations as much as 100,000 times their normal amounts in seawater. Abnormally high concentrations of beryllium, scandium, chromium, and iodine have been found in algae; of copper and arsenic in both the soft and skeletal parts of invertebrate animals; and of zirconium and cerium in plankton.

Desalinization, tidal power, and minerals from the sea

For ages a source of food and common salt, the sea is increasingly becoming a source of water, chemicals, and energy. In 1967 Key West, Fla., became the first U.S. city to be supplied solely by water from the sea, drawing its supplies from a plant that produces more than 2,000,000 gallons of refined water daily. Magnesia was extracted from the Mediterranean in the late 19th century; at present nearly all the magnesium metal used in the United States is mined from the sea at Freeport, Texas. Many ambitious schemes for using tidal power have been devised, but the first major hydrographic project of this kind was not completed until 1967, when a dam and electrical generating equipment were installed across the Rance River in Brittany. The seafloor and the strata below the continental shelves are also sources of mineral wealth. Concretions of manganese oxide, evidently formed in the process of subaqueous weathering of volcanic rocks, have been found in dense concentrations with a total abundance of 1011tons. In addition to the manganese, these concretions contain copper, nickel, cobalt, zinc, and molybdenum. To date, oil and gas have been the most valuable products to be produced from beneath the sea.

Ocean bathymetry

Modern bathymetric charts show that about 20 percent of the surfaces of the continents are submerged to form continental shelves. Altogether the shelves form an area about the size of Africa. Continental slopes, which slant down from the outer edges of the shelves to the abyssal plains of the seafloor, are nearly everywhere furrowed by submarine canyons. The depths to which these canyons have been cut below sea level seem to rule out the possibility that they are drowned valleys cut by ordinary streams. More likely the canyons were eroded by turbidity currents, dense mixtures of mud and water that originate as mud slides in the heads of the canyons and pour down their bottoms.

Profiling of the Pacific Basin prior to and during World War II resulted in the discovery of hundreds of isolated eminences rising 1,000 or more metres above the floor. Of particular interest were seamounts in the shape of truncated cones, whose flat tops rise to between 1.6 kilometres and a few hundred metres below the surface. Harry H. Hess interpreted the flat-topped seamounts (guyots) as volcanic mountains planed off by action of waves before they subsided to their present depths. Subsequent drilling in guyots west of Hawaii confirmed this view; samples of rocks from the tops contained fossils of Cretaceous age representing reef-building organisms of the kind that inhabit shallow water.

Ocean circulation, currents, and waves

Early in the century Vilhelm Bjerknes, a Norwegian meteorologist, and V. Walfrid Ekman, a Swedish physical oceanographer, investigated the dynamics of ocean circulation and developed theoretical principles that have influenced subsequent studies of currents in the sea. Bjerknes showed that very small forces resulting from pressure differences caused by nonuniform density of seawater can initiate and maintain fluid motion. Ekman analyzed the influence of winds and the Earth’s rotation on currents. He theorized that in a homogeneous medium the frictional effects of winds blowing across the surface would cause movement of successively lower layers of water, the deeper the currents so produced the less their velocity and the greater their deflection by the Coriolis effect (an apparent force due to the Earth’s rotation that causes deflection of a moving body to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere), until at some critical depth an induced current would move in a direction opposite to that of the wind.

Results of many investigations suggest that the forces that drive the ocean currents originate at the interface between water and air. The direct transfer of momentum from the atmosphere to the sea is doubtless the most important driving force for currents in the upper parts of the ocean. Next in importance are differential heating, evaporation, and precipitation across the air–sea boundary, altering the density of seawater and thus initiating movement of water masses with different densities. Studies of the properties and motion of water at depth have shown that strong currents also exist in the deep sea and that distinct types of water travel far from their geographic sources. For example, the highly saline water of the Mediterranean that flows through the Strait of Gibraltar has been traced over a large part of the Atlantic, where it forms a deep-water stratum that is circulated far beyond that ocean in currents around Antarctica.

Improvements in devices for determining the motion of seawater in three dimensions have led to the discovery of new currents and to the disclosure of unexpected complexities in the circulation of the oceans generally. In 1951 a huge countercurrent moving eastward across the Pacific was found below depths as shallow as 20 metres, and in the following year an analogous equatorial undercurrent was discovered in the Atlantic. In 1957 a deep countercurrent was detected beneath the Gulf Stream with the aid of subsurface floats emitting acoustic signals.

Since the 1970s Earth-orbiting satellites have yielded much information on the temperature distribution and thermal energy of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream. Chemical analyses from Geosecs makes possible the determination of circulation paths, speeds, and mixing rates of ocean currents.

Surface waves of the ocean are also exceedingly complex, at most places and times reflecting the coexistence and interferences of several independent wave systems. During World War II, interest in forecasting wave characteristics was stimulated by the need for this critical information in the planning of amphibious operations. The oceanographers H.U. Sverdrup and Walter Heinrich Munk combined theory and empirical relationships in developing a method of forecasting “significant wave height”—the average height of the highest third of the waves in a wave train. Subsequently, this method was improved to permit wave forecasters to predict optimal routes for mariners. Forecasting of the most destructive of all waves, tsunamis, or “tidal waves,” caused by submarine quakes and volcanic eruptions, is another recent development. Soon after 159 persons were killed in Hawaii by the tsunami of 1946, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey established a seismic sea-wave warning system. Using a seismic network to locate epicentres of submarine quakes, the installation predicts the arrival of tsunamis at points around the Pacific Basin often hours before the arrival of the waves.

Glacier motion and the high-latitude ice sheets

Beginning around 1948, principles and techniques in metallurgy and solid-state physics were brought to bear on the mechanics of glacial movements. Laboratory studies showed that glacial ice deforms like other crystalline solids (such as metals) at temperatures near the melting point. Continued stress produces permanent deformation. In addition to plastic deformation within a moving glacier, the glacier itself may slide over its bed by mechanisms involving pressure melting and refreezing and accelerated plastic flow around obstacles. The causes underlying changes in rate of glacial movement, in particular spectacular accelerations called surges, require further study. Surges involve massive transfer of ice from the upper to the lower parts of glaciers at rates of as much as 20 metres a day, in comparison with normal advances of a few metres a year.

As a result of numerous scientific expeditions into Greenland and Antarctica, the dimensions of the remaining great ice sheets are fairly well known from gravimetric and seismic surveys. In parts of both continents it has been determined that the base of the ice is below sea level, probably due at least in part to subsidence of the crust under the weight of the caps. In 1966 a borehole was drilled 1,390 metres to bedrock on the North Greenlandice sheet, and two years later a similar boring of 2,162 metres was cut through the Antarctic ice at Byrd Station. From the study of annual incremental layers and analyses of oxygen isotopes, the bottom layers of ice cored in Greenland were estimated to be more than 150,000 years old, compared with 100,000 years for the Antarctic core. With the advent of geochemical dating of rocks it has become evident that the Ice Age, which in the earlier part of the century was considered to have transpired during the Quaternary Period, actually began much earlier. In Antarctica, for example, potassium–argon age determinations of lava overlying glaciated surfaces and sedimentary deposits of glacial origin show that glaciers existed on this continent at least 10,000,000 years ago.

The study of ice sheets has benefited much from data produced by advanced instruments, computers, and orbiting satellites. The shape of ice sheets can be determined by numerical modeling, their heat budget from thermodynamic calculations, and their thickness with radar techniques. Colour images from satellites show the temperature distribution across the polar regions, which can be compared with the distribution of land and sea ice.

Atmospheric sciences
Probes, satellites, and data transmission

Kites equipped with meteorgraphs were used as atmospheric probes in the late 1890s, and in 1907 the U.S. Weather Bureau recorded the ascent of a kite to 7,044 metres above Mt. Weather, Virginia.

In the 1920s the radio replaced the telegraph and telephone as the principal instrument for transmitting weather data. By 1936 the radio meteorgraph (radiosonde) was developed, with capabilities of sending signals on relative humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure from unmanned balloons. Experimentation with balloons up to altitudes of about 31 kilometres showed that columns of warm air may rise more than 1.6 kilometres above the Earth’s surface and that the lower atmosphere is often stratified, with winds in the different layers blowing in different directions. During the 1930s airplanes began to be used for observations of the weather, and the years since 1945 have seen the development of rockets and weather satellites. TIROS (Television Infra-Red Observation Satellite), the world’s first all-weather satellite, was launched in 1960, and in 1964 the Nimbus Satellite of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was rocketed into near-polar orbit.

There are two types of weather satellites: polar and geostationary. Polar satellites, like Nimbus, orbit the Earth at low altitudes of a few hundred kilometres, and, because of their progressive drift, they produce a photographic coverage of the entire Earth every 24 hours. Geostationary satellites, first sent up in 1966, are situated over the Equator at altitudes of about 35,000 kilometres and transmit data at regular intervals. Much information can be derived from the data collected by satellites. For example, wind speed and direction are measured from cloud trajectories, while temperature and moisture profiles of the atmosphere are calculated from infrared data.

Weather forecasting

Efforts at incorporating numerical data on weather into mathematical formulas that could then be used for forecasting were initiated early in the century at the Norwegian Geophysical Institute. Vilhelm Bjerknes and his associates at Bergen succeeded in devising equations relating the measurable components of weather, but their complexity precluded the rapid solutions needed for forecasting. Out of their efforts, however, came the polar front theory for the origin of cyclones and the now-familiar names of cold front, warm front, and stationary front for the leading edges of air masses (see climate: Atmospheric pressure and wind).

In 1922 the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson demonstrated that the complex equations of the Norwegian school could be reduced to long series of simple arithmetic operations. With no more than the desk calculators and slide rules then available, however, the solution of a problem in procedure only raised a new one in manpower. In 1946 the mathematician John von Neumann and his fellow workers at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., began work on an electronic device to do the computation faster than the weather developed. Four years later the von Neumann group could claim that, given adequate data, their computer could forecast the weather as well as a weatherman. Present-day numerical weather forecasting is achieved with the help of advanced computer analysis (see weather forecasting).

Cloud physics


Properties and structure of the atmosphere




Weather modification

