The written record of mankind refers to catastrophes of
many types and sizes, including the biblical story of the great flood
of Noah.
Most Neptunists and Plutonists assumed that
global-scale events were more likely to happen gradually, like
erosion, rather than suddenly, like an earthquake. But even James
Hutton allowed for the possibility that a single event, such as a
sudden uplift from below, could radically reform or destroy a
continent.
In 1817, Georges Cuvier published Essay on the Theory of the Earth Studying the strata near Paris, he found evidence of
massive extinctions of various organisms that appeared to be caused
by repeated floodings from the sea. He reasoned that deformed layers
under the flat layers showed that sudden, massive crustal
dislocations caused the flooding and extinctions. In other words,
catastrophic events. He argued that the most recent catastrophes
happened within the last 5000 or 6000 years, leaving a small number
of survivors who started the human race anew.
Fifteen years later,
uniformitarian and catastrophist were used by William Whewell to
indicate what would become the two major competing views in the 19th
century.
In 1840, a Swiss, Louis Agassiz,
published Etudes sur les
glaciers. He had originally believed in a global ice age,
ending with a catastrophic event that suddently brought the Alps
mountains into existence. His essay took the position that all this
had happened much more gradually than originally claimed.
By the beginning of the 20th
century it was beginning to be widely assumed that the use of
radioactive measure to date rocks was undermining catastrophic
theories because of the millions-of-years time-lines that such dating
methods generated.
But anyone looking over the astronomer's shoulder at
the cosmos can see in any direction a simple truth--that massive
catastrophes on a scale almost impossible to digest is nature's
way.
On earth, some would count as a global catastrophe
something that is powerful enough in intensity or duration to close
down one geological era and open up a new one.
As Professor Derek Ager has pointed out, recent
catastrophicists include J. Harlen Bretz. Between 1923 and 1969
repeatedly argued his theory that the evidence of sediments showed
that in the U.S., the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana
had been swept by a gargantuan flood of water. The evidence of the
water's power is deep gorges (coulees) in rock as wear-resistant as
solid basalt, such as the current site of the Grand Coulee dam. Now
widely accepted, Bretz's theory of the Channeled Scablands was for
many years rejected out of hand and ridiculed.
Since catastrophic flooding has been recorded at sites
around the world, the important question is: what was the source such
massive amounts of water and the cause of its powerful movements.
From another angle, comes Ken Hsu's 1983 book, whose
title speaks for itself: The Mediterranean
Was A Desert
