Earth History

The Development of Geology

In the mid 1600's, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagah, James Ussher published a paper on the chronology of human and Earth history. In this work, he traced the Earth's history through the study of the Bible to determine the Earth’s age of approximately 4,000 years old.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the idea of catastrophism was widely popular. This idea stated that the landscapes of the Earth were the result of great catastrophes taking a very short time to develop. This idea became popular because people were trying to align the creation of canyons and mountains to the timeline of the Earth’s age presented by James Ussher.

When James Hutton presented his Theory of the Earth in the late 1700s, modern geology began. In his work, he presented the principle of uniformitarianism. This fundamental geologic principle states that the physical, chemical and biological laws that operate today also operated in the geologic past.