Lecture 1

Lived 384 - 322 BCE Made some educated guesses based on philosophical reasoning, not careful empirical observations Ex. Fossil fishes: believed fish must live deep within the Earth Everyone believed his guesses about the nature and the Earth for ~2000 years

Calculated Earth’s creation date as 4004 BCE Ussher was working within the constraints of Biblical chronology, aiming to fit human history and the Earth’s history into a framework consistent with scripture Shaped seventeenth and eighteenth-century ideas about Earth’s history

A guiding doctrine influenced by Ussher’s calculations Proposed that Earth’s landscapes were shaped by sudden, worldwide catastrophes Suggested these events were caused by unknown processes no longer active today An attempt to explain complex feature by quick and definitively phenomena Imagines Earth processes as infrequent, violent and extraordinary, in contrast to modern ideas of gradual change

A scientist that revolutionized geology by introducing foundational principles for interpreting Earth’s rock layers

Sedimentary layers provide a record of Earth’s history that can be decoded using observable patterns Superposition, original horizontality and cross-cutting relationships laid the groundwork for relative dating methods in geology

Set principles with Steno Believed most features on Earth are due to small processes over a long time

Natural processes operate now in the same way they did in the past. Happened for a very long time