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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flood geology | 4/12 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_geology | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:19:57.530514+00:00 | kb-cron |
But if the supposed impetuous torrent excavated valleys, and transported masses of rocks to a distance from their original repositories, then must the soil have been swept from off the earth to the destruction of the vegetable tribes. Moses does not record such an occurrence. On the contrary, in his history of the dove and the olive-leaf plucked off, he furnishes a proof that the flood was not so violent in its motions as to disturb the soil, nor to overturn the trees which it supported. When Sedgwick visited Paris at the end of 1826 he found hostility to diluvialism: Alexander von Humboldt ridiculed it "beyond measure", and Louis-Constant Prévost "lectured against it". In the summer of 1827 Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison travelled to investigate the geology of the Scottish Highlands, where they found "so many indications of local diluvial operations" that Sedgwick began to change his mind about it being worldwide. When George Poulett Scrope published his investigations into the Auvergne in 1827, he did not use the term "diluvium". He was followed by Murchison and Charles Lyell whose account appeared in 1829. All three agreed that the valleys could well have been formed by rivers acting over a long time, and a deluge was not needed. Lyell, formerly a pupil of Buckland, put strong arguments against diluvialism in the first volume of his Principles of Geology published in 1830, though suggesting the possibility of a deluge affecting a region such as the low-lying area around the Caspian Sea. Sedgwick responded to this book in his presidential address to the Geological Society in February 1830, agreeing that diluvial deposits had formed at differing times. At the society a year later, when retiring from the presidency, Sedgwick described his former belief that "vast masses of diluvial gravel" had been scattered worldwide in "one violent and transitory period" as "a most unwarranted conclusion", and therefore thought "it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation." However, he remained convinced that a flood as described in Genesis was not excluded by geology. One student had seen the gradual abandonment of diluvialism: Charles Darwin had attended Jameson's geology lectures in 1826 and at Cambridge became a close friend of Henslow before learning geology from Sedgwick in 1831. At the outset of the Beagle voyage Darwin was given a copy of Lyell's Principles of Geology and at the first landfall began his career as a geologist with investigations which supported Lyell's concept of slow uplift while also describing loose rocks and gravel as "part of the long disputed Diluvium". Debates continued over the part played by repeated exceptional catastrophes in geology, and in 1832 William Whewell dubbed this view catastrophism, while naming Lyell's insistence on explanations based on current processes uniformitarianism. Buckland, too, gradually modified his views on the deluge. In 1832 a student noted Buckland's view on cause of diluvial gravel, "whether is Mosaic inundation or not, will not say". In a footnote to his Bridgewater Treatise of 1836, Buckland backed down from his former claim that the "violent inundation" identified in his Reliquiae Diluvianae was the Genesis flood:
it seems more probable, that the event in question, was the last of the many geological revolutions that have been produced by violent irruptions of water, rather than the comparatively tranquil inundation described in the Inspired Narrative. It has been justly argued, against the attempt to identity these two great historical and natural phenomena, that, as the rise and fall of the waters of the Mosaic deluge are described to have been gradual and of short duration, they would have produced comparatively little change on the surface of the country they overflowed. For a while, Buckland had continued to insist that some geological layers were related to the Great Flood, but grew to accept the idea that they represented multiple inundations which occurred well before humans existed. In 1840 he made a field trip to Scotland with the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz and became convinced that the "diluvial" features which he had attributed to the deluge had, in fact, been produced by ancient ice ages. Buckland became one of the foremost champions of Agassiz's theory of glaciations, and diluvialism went out of use in geology. Active geologists no longer posited sudden ancient catastrophes with unknown causes and instead increasingly explained phenomena by observable processes causing slow changes over great periods.