Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
research time, the need to 'cram' these RAF cadets meant that
the long vacations disappeared and precious research time was
almost non-existent.
Expected to cover a full year's syllabus in six months, Holmes
soon found himself under pressure and looking for ways of
speeding up his lectures. The obvious solution was for the
students to arrive more prepared having studied some of the
work beforehand, but his lectures had always been very self-
contained, providing the students with most of what they needed
without recourse to extraneous material - the main reason for
this being that there simply was no book available that covered
all the topics on his course. The three stalwarts of the first year
reading list had all been written in the previous century! None of
them contained anything about radioactive dating, continental
drift or any of the more recent developments in geology. Only
now recognising how serious the problem was, it eventually
dawned on Holmes that actually there was a book he could use
- but it was still in the form of his lecture notes. Immediately he
resolved to remedy the situation and to utilise the peace and quiet
of fire watching duty to put a book together. Night after night
he sat at his upright typewriter - he still did all his own typing
even when he had access to a secretary - turning his notes into
one of the most celebrated topics on geology ever written.
Within a year most of the work was complete and only a cou-
ple of chapters remained outstanding. Lack of evidence to the
contrary meant that the Earth was by then widely accepted as
being, in round numbers, two thousand million years old, so
the only other truly contentious issue in geology at that time was
continental drift. Holmes thought long and hard about whether
to include it in the topic for, even in 1943, his theories on con-
vection currents in the mantle as a mechanism for driving con-
tinental plates around the globe were still largely ignored, and
for a decade now any discussion on continental drift had lain
virtually dormant. To come out so publicly in print would leave
him exposed to ridicule in a few years time if his theories were
