Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Today of course we realise that much of our present-day land-
scape has been moulded by two major mechanisms: the action of
water and rivers (fluvialism), and the action of ice (glaciation). The
dynamic action of rivers was reinforced by Joseph Beete Jukes in a
famous paper read in Dublin in 1857 and published later that year in
Dublin, where he was able to demonstrate the process of capture by
one river of another and the superimposition of a younger southern-
flowing river system on an older underlying east-west trending geo-
logical structure of mountains and valleys. This produced the unusual
right-angled bends on the River Blackwater at Cappoquin, County
Waterford, and on the River Lee near Cork in southern Ireland.
We also realise that ice played a dominant role in modifying the
landscape. In northern Europe in the 1840s the persuasive Louis
Agassiz (1807-1873) championed the glacial cause. Agassiz was at
the time best known for his work on fossil fish for which he had
received the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society in 1836. He
of course held an advantage over his colleagues who lived in warmer
climates, in that he lived in Switzerland and spent a great deal of time
studying active glacial features in the Alps around of Neuch
ˆ
tel. His
coup de gra
ˆ
ce came at the 1840 meeting of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science held in Glasgow when he brought to
Britain his ideas, and those of others working in Switzerland, on the
extent of past glaciations. Ignace Venetz-Sitten (1788-1859), a civil
engineer, in a talk delivered in 1821 and published twelve years later,
had suggested that the Swiss glaciers formerly extended far beyond
their present limits, while his friend Jean de Charpentier (1786-1855),
a graduate of FreibergMining Academy and a director of the salt mines
at Bex (a village situated 26miles southeast of Lausanne, and once also
noted for its sulphur baths), read a paper to the Helvetic Society in
1834 advancing the views of Venetz-Sitten. The reaction in Glasgow
to Agassiz was hostile. Following the meeting Agassiz and Buckland
embarked on a tour of Scotland, taking in a trip to the parallel roads of
Glen Roy, and by the time they reached Charles Lyell at his estate at
Kinnordy, Buckland had changed his tune and had embraced the
