Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
the Sun evaporated water trapped between the inner and outer crusts. Fissures coalesced
into large fractures as the undermined and weakened outer crust foundered into the watery
abyss, triggering a great flood and forming both mountains and seas.
Descartes' imaginative idea offered a way to generate the world's topography all at once.
His grand physical explanation for how to generate a global flood inspired other natural
philosophers to think up ways to trigger the biblical flood. With little evidence available
to contradict or refute any idea no matter how outrageous, competing flood theories soon
posed creative ways to explain how God designed a world preprogrammed for destruction.
Today, such theories seem fantastically ridiculous, like bizarre figments of feverish
minds. But in their day, they were serious attempts to explain the world. Imagination raced
ahead of understanding as the reality of Noah's Flood was taken on faith in theories devised
to explain the origin of topography. Facts only started to get in the way of a good theory
once geological principles were systematized.
After Galileo's ordeal, Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher became a leading voice among
clergy interested in natural history. Professor of mathematics, physics, and Oriental lan-
guages at the Jesuit College of Rome, he published lavishly illustrated natural history topics
that became wildly popular among the European elite. An eccentric by any standard, Kirch-
er explored deep grottoes and canyons, even having himself lowered into the volcanic
craters of Etna and Vesuvius to see what lay below ground. Finding subterranean streams
high in the Alps, he saw the fact that some caves were filled with water and others with fire
as the key to one of Earth's great mysteries—the origin of rivers. His
Mundus Subterraneus
(
Subterranean World
), an encyclopedic compilation of geologic fact and fable published in
1664, suggested that ocean tides pumped seawater up into mountains through underground
channels that connected to springs at the head of rivers. Fires deep beneath volcanoes, act-
ing like a global radiator system, drove water up from holes in the bottom of the sea to feed
mountain springs. Kircher had the concept of a hydrological cycle right, but the direction
backwards. Today we know that water evaporates from the oceans and rains down on the
continents and then runs off into the sea.
A decade later, in his
Arca Noë
(
Noah's Ark
), Kircher maintained that God unleashed
Noah's Flood by causing vast underground lakes to overflow. Great blocks of the planet's
outer shell foundered into his subterranean reservoirs, leaving distorted layers of broken
