Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
prerequisite to further understanding of the geological history of the
Earth. This ordered scheme was stratigraphy, and it provided a coher-
ent logical framework in which the different and recognisable litho-
logical successions could be arranged. The benefits of this were
obvious: later researchers could follow on from former workers, and
with their newer information, build on pre-existing data, and infill the
framework where gaps were present. This all sounds foolproof, but
geological societies and their members do not belong to a utopian
world, and from the earliest days of these organisations, arguments
and downright hostility were commonplace. Individual or closely
allied geologists and scientists laid claim to vast swathes of country-
side which they felt to be their own domain. Nevertheless, and setting
such debate aside, large leaps in the understanding of geological
conundrums were made in the 1800s, so that by the 1850s the strati-
graphical framework now familiar to modern-day geologists was
broadly in situ.
STRATIGRAPHICAL GEOLOGY ANDMODERN PROTOCOL
Charles Hepworth Holland, who has been closely involved with mat-
ters of stratigraphy, particularly that relating to the Silurian, defined
stratigraphy thus in his book The Idea of Time (Chichester: Wiley,
1999): 'Stratigraphy is the study of successions of rocks and the inter-
pretation of these as sequences of events in the history of the Earth.'
Stratigraphy is one of the fundamental disciplines of geology and
has been the focus of huge volumes of research. Today many matters
of stratigraphical protocol are controlled by the International Union
of Geological Sciences (IUGS), which has a number of committees or
commissions to oversee particular geological periods/systems or
boundaries between them. For example we have, or had until their
workwas completed, the sub-commissions on Devonian Stratigraphy,
and the Silurian-Devonian Boundary, to name but two. These com-
missions are formed of geologists from around the world who have a
particular interest in rocks of a particular age. While geologists are
fundamentally interested in rocks as a whole, many academic and
