Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
at the time, wrote: "Catastrophes are the mainstays of people who
have very little knowledge of the natural world; for them the invoca-
tion of a catastrophe is an easy way to explain great events."
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Walter Bucher was an eminent American geologist and the coun-
try's leading authority on mysterious rock structures that geologists
referred to as "cryptovolcanic." Here and there around the globe,
rocks at the surface are broken into a set of concentric faults that
form a bull's-eye pattern. Often the structures occur in sedimentary
rocks hundreds of miles from the nearest volcanic lavas. Neverthe-
less, geologists, looking down and not up, could think of no other
plausible origin for these structures than that they were created by
gases exploding from invisible underground volcanoes. A few brave
souls had the temerity to suggest that these features might actually
be
a kind of bull's-eye, marking the target struck by an impacting
meteorite. In 1963 Bucher wrote in the definitive paper rebutting
this view: "Before we look to the sky to solve our problems mira-
culously in one blow, we should consider the possibility that crypto-
explosion [cryptovolcanic] structures and explosion craters may
hold important clues to processes going on at great depth below our
feet, even if it threatens to lead us back to another 'traditional' con-
cept, that of cooling of the outer mantle. Distrust in traditional
thinking should not deter us from looking hard at all aspects of the
problem. Doing so will probably yield more useful results than com-
puting possible velocities of imagined meteorites."
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In other words,
do not try to solve geologic problems by appealing to missing mete-
orites from space.
Tony Hallam, a distinguished British geologist, advised that
"Environmental changes on this planet as recorded by the facies
[rock types] should be thoroughly explored before invoking the
deus
ex machina
of strange happenings in outer space. ... It is intuitively
more satisfying to seek causes from amongst those phenomena
which are comparatively familiar to our experience."
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A 1986 review
article intended to sum up matters for students and teachers stated
that "it is not necessary to invoke a meteorite impact to explain the
K/T extinctions, and, in actuality, an impact does not explain those
extinctions."
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The award for the most unlikely source of negative reaction goes
to the
New York Times,
which in a 1985 editorial curiously titled
"Miscasting the Dinosaur's Horoscope," declared that "terrestrial
events, like volcanic activity, or change in climate or sea level, are the
most immediate possible cause of mass extinctions. Astronomers
should leave to astrologers the task of seeking the causes of earthly
events in the stars."
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3
This prompted Stephen Jay Gould to fantasize
in
Discover
magazine what might have been written in
Osservatore
