Lesson 2: Origins Flashcards
Mountains occur in ___ of the world’s countries.
3/4.
They occur in every continent and in every climate. They can be found in every ocean.
Early Western theories:
Before the 1700s, for many people in the West, what determined how the Earth’s past was imagined?
The Christian Bible.
According to the Bible, the beginning of the world as a recent event. The planet was 6,000 yrs old, and its surface looked the same as it always had. Mountains were made on the 3rd day - same day the polar zones were frozen and tropics were warmed.
Video:
Who is James Ussher and what was his calculation?
- He was an early scholar from the 1600s and Irish Archbishop of Armagh
- He calculated the Earth had a beginning date of 9 AM on Monday, October 23rd, 4004 BC.
Early Western theories:
Who was Thomas Burnett?
- He was an Anglican churchman from Cambridge, who published “The Sacred Theory of the Earth” in 1961
- He might have been the first to challenge the conventional understanding of the Bible, allowing mountains to go up in contemplation.
- He developed the MUNDANE EGG theory
- He crossed the European Alps several times as a chaperone for the “Grand Tour”
- Intrigues by broken rock debris
- Challenged belief that the visible world had not always looked the same, but hadn’t suggest that it was older than 6,000 yrs (happened in 1700s)
Early Western theories:
What was “The Grand Tour?”
- The Grand Tour was one of the earliest forms of modern tourism from the 17th and 18th century.
- It was a rite of passage for many young English and European elites to polish off their formal education by exposing themselves to continental architecture and to geography, to history and culture
- It required a crossing of the European Alps and it was here where Burnett became increasingly intrigued by mountains
Early Western theories:
What was “The Great Flood?”
- Key to the Earth’s appearance was The Great Flood, that bibliccal story of a flood so great that it destroyed civilization in an act of divine retribution
- Burnett concluded that it would take 8 oceans of water to cover the highest mountain tops in 40 days of rain, and it didn’t add up
Early Western theories:
What is the Mundane Egg?
- A metaphor of the earth, where it was flawless in appearance, without hills or vales to disrupt its surface. The inner architecture was a fiery core, the yolk. A water filled abyss was the white of the egg which the shell of the earth floated
Early Western theories:
How did mountains build in the Mundane Egg?
- Over years, the sun dried out the Earth’s surface, causing it to crack and fracture
- Water pressed up into those cracks until it burst, resulting in a flood
- When the waters receded, they left chaos behind, the mountains.
- The mountains were signs of humanity’s sinfulness
Early Western theories:
Who was Georges Buffon?
- He was a French natural historian, who estimated the earth to be 75,000 years old in the mid 1700s
- He turned each of the seven Biblical days of creation into an epoch of indefinite length, creating space and time necessary for geologists to begin their work of exposing a deep history for the earth, all the while staying within the bounds of Biblical scripture
- The science of geology could now emerge without accusations of blasphemy
Early Western theories:
By the start of the 1800s, two schools of thinking emerged among geologists regarding the age of the earth and the origin of mountains. What is Catastrophism?
- Catastrophism was the school that believed that the history of the earth was dominated by major geophysical revolutions that convulsed the planet with water and ice and fire and had all but extinguished life. Drastic tidal waves, global tsunamis, severe earthquakes and volcanos, the passing of comets, all of this events had shaped the earth surface into its present disruption.
Early Western theories:
By the start of the 1800s, two schools of thinking emerged among geologists regarding the age of the earth and the origin of mountains. What is Uniformitarianism?
- They held that the Earth had never been subject to a global catastrophe, earthquakes yes, volcanoes yes. These phenomena had certainly taken place through a geological history, but they were localized events. They rearranged the landscape only within their own vicinity.
- Change in the land was achieved astonishingly slowly by forces of wear and tear through the ordinance of nature, rain, snow, frost, rivers, seas.
- This required lots of time, millions of years
Video:
Who was Charles Lylell?
- Charles Lyell was a Scottish geologist of the 19th century who wrote the book “The Principles of Geology”
- Didn’t need any special equipment or long training to decipher the earth’s history, just eyes
Video:
Who was Charles Darwin?
- Darwin followed Lyell, and interpreted landscape, and inspired his famous thinking on natural selection
- Iconic bird’s eye view high above Valparaiso on the top of the 1900 meter high peak, Cerro La Campana on the Main Chain of the Andes.
Video:
Where is Yoho National Park and what lake show’s it’s significance?
- Yoho National Park, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, also called the Burgess Shale, is the site of the world’s first protected complex marine ecosystem.
Video:
What is the Burgess Shale?
- The Burgess Shale is recognized as the most important fossil deposits in the world. It is 505 million years old, which places it in the middle of the Cambrian period
- It has fossil deposits of soft tissue organisms like worms
Video:
Who was Mary Anning?
- Marry Anning was an English fossil collector, who shined light upon ancient ages of monstrous creatures, mammoths and mammals, sea dragons, giant lizards, dinosaurs in the 1800s
Current theories:
Who was Alfred Wegener?
- In 1912, a German meteorologist that made 2 starling suggestions: (1) the continents move, and (2) that, 300 mya, the continents were all part of a single supercontinent “Pangea” (‘all-lands’)
- Today, Wegener’s theory is the substantial basis for our understanding of plate tectonics and the formation of mountains
Current theories:
What was Wegener’s proof?
- Continents fit together like jig-saw puzzle
- Fossil specimens
- Climatic evidence
It wouldn’t be until the 1950s, with advances in paleomagnetism, that Wegener’s theory of continental drift was reappraised. What is paleomagnetism?
- The study of the Earth’s magnetic field
Plate tectonics:
What is the basic idea of Plate Tectonics?
- The Earth’s surface is broken into several rigid plates. These plates are made up of the Earth’s crust and the upper part of the mantle layer underneath.
Plate tectonics:
What are the parts of the Earth in terms of Plate Tectonics?
- ) Crust - outer most layer
- ) Lithosphere - made up of the crust and upper mantle
- ) Asthenosphere - more malleable inner layer
- ) Mantle
- ) Core
Plate tectonics:
What are Lithospheric Plates?
- They are comprised of either continental or oceanic crust or both.
- Ocean plates are thinner, less than 100km thick, but denser
- Continental plates are roughly 150-200km thick
Plate tectonics:
Each plate is moving in various directions. How fast do they move?
- From 1 - 10 centimeters per year (as fast as fingernails)
