Deep under the scenic, placid blue seas of southeast Asia, off the coast of Aceh Province, a geological horror is forming of gargantuan proportions. One which will leave its novel signature for eons in the rocky column. A new layer of strata has been laid down, but this deposit is uniquely macabre. It’s a hominid bone-bed. Mixed in with the newly forming sandstones, limestones, shales, and chalk, are the remains of a civilization. Homes, trees, crops, cars, factories. And the unthinkable human toll: 100,000 dead men, women, and children. At least now they lay peacefully, no longer wide eyed in fear, the final echo of their lives flickering through their oxygen deprived psyche. At least that tragic part is over, for them; back in the earth from which we all, ultimately, arise and then return.

Here’s at least one reason why pandering politicians don’t need to be playing ‘to the base’ using Creationism or any other nonsense.

Pseudoscientific fantasy and supernatural drivel simply doesn’t address, predict, warn about, or deal with real natural dangers, and it never will. Ignorance is bliss, right up until it kills you.

April 18, 1906 just after 5:00 AM

“ ... The shock was constantly growing heavier; rumbles, crackling noises, and falling objects ...  It grew constantly worse, the noise deafening; the crash of dishes, falling pictures, the rattle of the flat tin roof, bookcases being overturned, the piano hurled across the parlor, the groaning and straining of the building itself ... then the chimney came tearing through ... “-Emma M. Burke

“I started to walk down town ... there were hardly any panes of glass left in any of the show windows. When I got still further I began to see [more] vagaries of this sleeping giant ... Buildings were tumbled over on their sides, others looked as though they had been cut off short with a cleaver, the whole front having fallen through the sidewalk into the basement."- Peter
Bacigalupi

The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 killed hundreds, burned a large part of downtown to the ground, and it was mild compared to some its more powerful siblings. An earthquake was responsible for the deadliest landslide this century, which caused 40,000-50,000 deaths in western Iran on June 20, 1990. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake at Mount Huascaran, Peru, on May 21, 1970, triggered a rock and snow avalanche that buried the towns of Yungay and Ranrahirca, 20,000 people were buried alive. And we won’t ever forget the asian tsunami which wiped Aceh Province off the map last Christmas.

Geoscience is important. Lest we forget just how important, beyond the role it plays in the search and production of energy and resources which fuel our agri-civilization; earthquakes and the tsunamis they produce are among the most violent, indiscriminate, wholesale killers nature can deal out. And the subterranean dangers are not limited to quakes. Volcanos aren’t much fun to be around when they blow their tops either. Less visible but just as deadly are asphyxiating gases sometimes released silently from lakes, swamps, and fissures; they can and have knocked off whole towns. It’s not overstating the case to say ignorance about local geology can kill you and your whole neighborhood deader than a doornail. Legitimate scientific knowledge can mean the difference between life and death.

Throughout the late 19th century chemistry played a big role in helping geologists get a handle on the processes of rock and mineral formation deep in the bowels of the earth. As quickly as chemists came to understand how heat, pressure, and catalysts, could produce chemical changes in various mixtures of substances, the knowledge was applied to lithification. Geologists came to understand that rocks came in three basic types: 1) Sedimentary rocks formed from compressed deposits of silt, soil, sand, and other small grains, usually weathered off of exposed rock and transporting into beds by the action of rain and wind, 2) Metamorphic rocks resulted when sedimentary rock was heated to the pointed that chemical changes took place altering the texture and other physical properties of the strata, 3) Igneous rocks were the cooled and hardened remains of what was once lava or magma.

Analysis of rock and mineral became a much more precise science as a result of all this, and the commercial reward for being able to effectively locate and process material to extract valuable metals and other substances on a large industrial scale was lucrative indeed.

The knowledge thus gained lent credence to old earth uniformism while leading to still more serious heat issues for Young Earth Creationism and Flood Geology. As an example, the formation of calcite is an exothermic process-meaning it produces considerable quantities of heat. Tallying up a rough estimate of the calcite deposits alone and working out the heat release it represents yields a figure of sufficient magnitude to boil the oceans if compressed into a single year!

Beginning in the 1880s one of the greatest analytical tools for the new science of geology confirmed what scores of volcanologist and naturalist had suspected for decades. The interior of the earth was not solid and immovable, but a great reservoir of red-hot, molten rock and metal. Analysis of the refraction data gathered from quakes strongly supported a thick mantle of semi-liquid material surrounding an outer and inner core of heavier material. It’s sobering to consider that all of what we think of as the natural world, the lush green rain forests, the lofty mountains, frigid tundra, endless deserts, vast oceans, glittering glaciers, blizzards and hurricanes, war and peace, birth, life, and old age; all of it takes place on a fragile skin of frozen stone and mineral between three and twenty miles thick. If the earth were the size of a billiard ball, the crust would be thinner than the coating of shellac covering its surface. It’s so frighteningly thin in places that when a new dam is constructed and the awaiting basin fills with a large volume of water, the earth’s crust can bend under the added weight. In northern latitudes the surface is still rising after being relieved of loads of thick ice at the end of the Pleistocene in a process called isostatic rebound.

The new instrument was a simple arrangement; a pen on a heavy bob delicately suspended above a rotating drum of paper attached to a deep foundation set securely in the earth. The earth shakes, the frame holding the paper drum shakes with it, and the drum rotates. Note that the pen and weighted bob don’t move, the rest of the device does the moving along with the frame it’s housed in. Viola, you get a nice series of marks recording your quake. Credit for the seismograph is a subject of some debate. The first such crude device on record belongs to Chinese astronomer Chang Heng in 132 AD, and a number of similar instruments were built from time to time over the next two thousand years. But it’s generally recognized that our modern version, which came to be widely used in the late 19th century, was first developed by English seismologist John Milne.

Meteorology had developed along with geology at more or less the same pace. And by the turn of the century a network of synchronized weather stations connected counties and countries, at first by telegraph and then by telephone. This network allowed large-scale correlation of real time data, producing weather forecasts that were light years ahead of previous guesswork. Seismologists hoped that seismographic monitoring stations networked into the same Victorian era Internet would do something similar for earthquake forecasting. Alas, it was not to be. Despite the new insight into the earth’s interior courtesy of the seismograph, earthquakes remained stubbornly unimpressed with attempts at prediction. Volumes of data were collected, boxes of seismographic tracings from all over the world taken from various locations during major tremors and minor aftershocks soon cluttered the backrooms in university science libraries. Different waveforms were classified, studied, and much was learned about how and where the earthquakes were distributed around the world, how epicenters and peripheral zones behaved, and the propagation of the shock waves. Hypothesis were offered up and shot down. But after several decades geologists in the early 1900s still didn’t even have a consensus opinion on why earthquakes occurred. Let alone a workable theory that would allow some degree of prediction! The first hint of an answer to ‘why’ would come not from the geoscience community, but from a climatologist.

Geologists had known for years the geological data suggested that at one time the Americas were physically attached somehow to Europe and Africa. The prevailing explanation for the geological and fossil similarity remained the Land Bridge ‘Theory’, which posited that the two landmasses had been attached by some kind of isthmus or ancient archipelago stretching across the Atlantic Ocean. But even school children had noticed that the eastern contours of South America fit snugly onto the western coastline of Africa, and this coincidence was not lost on geologists. Numerous scientists from all over the world, Japan as well as Europe and the US, played around with the idea that perhaps the two continents had been one and the same.

It was a German Climatologist turned geophysicist named Alfred Wegener who was the first to stick his professional neck out with the idea of Continental Drift. Wegener proposed that the two landmasses had once been joined making one super continent he called Pangea. He estimated the date the two mass began separating at about two-hundred million years judging by the evidence preserved in the record on both continents.  Wegener even had the fore sight to show that as one went deeper in time, the single continent of Pangea was itself the composite of two earlier, separate continents, which he christened Laurasia and Gondwanaland. His evidence was not limited to the geological and physical similarity, Wegener was a first rate climatologist and meteorologist who amassed an impressive store of empirical data supporting the idea that the South and North America had to have been much hotter, and had supported a more tropical ecology, in the distant past. The implication was that both continents had been located at a different latitude at some point in time. His data was meticulous, his methodology rational, his reasoning sound, and he published it all in a volume entitled The Origin of Continents and Oceans: His peers promptly chopped his head off.

A few of the responses: “Utter, damned rot!” ... “If we are to believe [this] hypothesis, we must forget everything we have learned in the last 70 years and start all over again.” ..."Anyone who ‘valued his reputation for scientific sanity’ would never dare support such a theory” ... as well as plenty of less kind criticism questioning Wegener’s mental health and comparing his person to various types of human and animal waste products unfit to reproduce here.

Young Earth Creationism was a thing of the past by the 1920s, it lived on here and there in backwater churches, but most religious figures accepted an ancient earth with no problem despite feeling uneasy about Darwin. Even the more analytical offshoot called Catastrophism had long since been incorporated into the uniformist framework for the most part*. Around this same time, a celebrated trial between a high school athletic and science instructor, and the great state of Tennessee, was underway. The crime? Teaching evolution.  Oddly, the version of creationism presented as an alternative to evolutionary biology at the time was actually more sophisticated than much of the truly laughable idiocy now touted as legitimate science by elements of the fundamentalist Neo-Christian Right. William Jennings Bryan, the famed lead prosecuting attorney in the Scopes Monkey Trial, did indeed oppose Darwin’s Theory and was an ardent believer in creationism. But not even Jennings-clear back in 1925-was so hopelessly misinformed as to seriously contend the earth was only a few thousand years old, or that Noah’s Flood could explain the geological evidence collected over the last century. Yet that’s exactly what many in the fundamentalist community now argue the scientific evidence supports, and thus must be taught in the interests of fairness, open mindedness, and balance. It tells us something about the abysmal state of right-wing, we-make-our-own-reality-so-piss-off, fundamentalism in this country that fully a third or more of the extremist Bible thumping shock troops now embrace a form of ‘scientific creationism’ in the year 2005, that would have been laughed out of court by America’s premier defender of creationism before the invention of television.

*A version of catastrophism would have its day of scientific glory. It became clear to geologists and paleontologists that something significant had happened at the end of the reign of the dinosaurs. All over the earth the geological saga told the same story. Robust ecologies boasting giant reptiles were plentiful. Sauropods, duckbills, ceratopsians, and the king himself, T. rex, were well represented in the fossil record, from the polar regions to the tropics. Marine environments were chock full of plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. Every fossil found indicated a lush green world brimming with life. Then suddenly; nothing. No animals, no plants, not a trace of frond or claw could be found. When land dwelling vertebrates start tentatively appearing in the record again, it’s mostly small mammals and reptiles, but there are no more great dinosaurs or sea monsters. The world-wide boundary marking the end of the dinos is as sharp and clean as any in the fossil record. And in many places there is a thin deposit of dark material marking the separation between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary that looks for all the world like soot.

~DarkSyde~

Perhaps Wegener’s ideas would have won a more congenial reception over time, as his fellow geologists had a few years more to get used to the idea. And to be fair, although Wegener did produce a good bit of data supporting his thesis, neither he or anyone else offered up a well supported theoretical explanation for how seemingly immobile continents could go scuttling through the oceans and end up halfway around the planet. As matters stood Wegener was much like the biologists prior to Darwin and Wallace who strongly suspected common descent; he had good evidence, yet he lacked a mechanism to explain and unite it.  Maybe things would’ve been different, and some intrepid geologists and ocean explorers would have stumbled across some hints, had history not taken a blood-soaked turn.

But first World War One, then a global economic depression followed by World War Two intervened. And geologists were enlisted by the powers that be all over the world, tasked with recovering the raw ores and other materials demanded by Generals and the Military-Industrial Complex, i.e., metals, chemicals, and energy resources urgently required if humanity was to continue effectively slaughtering one another in ever escalating numbers. By the end of the mayhem novel technologies and a wealth of new data had been accumulated. Geologists now had the means available to literally get to the bottom of Wegener’s bold insight. But continental drift had fallen into relative obscurity, a fresh crop of geologists had arisen, and the new focus of geoscience turned to radiometric dating methods developed in no small measure as a spin off from government sponsored research into atomic physics-ultimately culminating in the Manhattan Project.

“There was a turtle by the name of Burt, and Burt the Turtle was very alert. When danger threatened him, he never got hurt; he knew just what to do. He’d duck and cover, duck and cover...”

Ahh yes, those “Happy Days”. As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, the unsolved problem of how and why earthquakes occurred was still at the back of many minds. Thankfully, creationism was now mostly absent as a topic in political discourse. At long last science was on a steep rise to wide-spread respectability and acceptance. It was somewhat unsettling for some practitioners that it had finally earned the admiration of the world ... by producing the means to blow it up. But for a planet that had been through the ringer and now nervously endured a cold-war standoff between east and west, the danger of mere natural disaster seemed less pressing than the thought of impending nuclear annihilation, and funding new research on old ideas about continental drift took a back seat to the study of the atom. There was plenty of state money from both hemispheres flowing into new high precision seismographic equipment all right. But most of the devices thus commissioned were discreetly located in the arctic or placed covertly in the domain of allied nations, and their markers traced out the faint echoes of a very different type of seismic data; manmade tremors from Siberia and distant, muffled, shock waves radiating from the secretive testing grounds of the Nevada wasteland. BTW-I don’t want anyone to get the idea I’m siding with the Soviets here. US behavior was less than exemplary plenty of times, but Stalin was the poster boy for inhumane butchery.

As the fifties drew to a close the cold-war tension wasn’t exactly declining. The standoff between the USSR and the free world was now a well understood battle of scientific prowess, us Vs theirs. As if there wasn’t enough stress already, Americans were about to get a scientific jolt to the collective national panic center that would wake up our leaders and serendipitously chase the last vestige of religious bias against evolutionary biology right out of the classrooms in public schools; all the way down to kindergartens in Georgia and Alabama. But even as the nation committed itself to programs nurturing new standards of scientific literacy among our youth, a self-absorbed menagerie of religious utlra-fundamentalists were laying the groundwork to breath life into the most insipid form of Biblical Literalism ever rejected by science, while lining their pockets with hard earned money cleverly fleeced from their victims. Worse, they set about working to force their nonsense into the scientific curricula by hook or by crook, the facts and our national security be damned.

The applications delivered by Robert Oppenhiemer and friends at Las Alamos would lead not only to the most terrifying weapons ever devised by man, it would also solidify our understanding of a new and exciting cornucopia of methods for reliably, finally, determining the actual age of the earth and all the fossils and strata within. In a rational world this new science would have laid Young Earthism to rest forever. You can judge the implications of that statement for yourselves. I’d like to report this stupidity is waning. The truth is, thanks to recent political events and a core of the GOP thugs who have gone right of the rails of sanity, it threatens to sweep the nation. To understand how truly ludicrous Young Earth Creationism is, and sample a few of their more deliciously underhanded attacks on valid science, we will have to retrace our steps through the early and middle part of 20th century, this time with an emphasis on radiometric dating. But that’s a whole ‘nother story ...