Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Of these four men, only Arduino steered clear of biblical expla-
nations for the formation of the various lithologies that he described.
The classifications erected by the other three were dependent on the
largely accepted premise that the water thought to have engulfed the
world during the period of Noah was the major geological process that
acted during the formation of the Earth's crustal and lower rocks. It is
perhaps surprising in hindsight that they did not stop to consider that
the story of the Flood was related by scribes writing about the events
that affected a small geographical region - the present day Middle East,
Iraq and Iran - and that the resultant geological effects (if any) of such
events could not be stretched to cover western Europe and beyond. No
doubt the authors of the Bible saw the effects of earthquakes which
would have occurred moderately frequently along the zone of crustal
weakness that runs from modern-day Turkey, south through Syria,
through the Dead Sea zone and into the Red Sea. Some major cata-
strophic happenings related in the Bible, such as the destruction of
Sodom and Gormorrah, the tumbling down of the walls of Jericho, and
the Flood, can all be explained rationally by attributing them to the
effects of an earthquake. Through the passage of time, such events
would have become embellished and explained in a way that the
listeners could rationalise within the compass of their own experi-
ence. It was far easier to invoke God, rather than understand the
complex causes and patterns of earthquakes.
The conceptual framework for the understanding of geological
history, as read through the rock successions, was now in place,
and geologists had a skeletal stratigraphical manual containing
blank pages waiting to be filled with additional lithological, biostrati-
graphical and chronostratigraphical data.
