/Everest_Pavel-Novak_WikimediaCommons2_GeologyTopo22-56a169ee3df78cf7726a86a9.jpg) |
| Picture from https://www.thoughtco.com/geology-of-mount-everest-755308 "The Geology of Mount Everest," |
For the geo-nerds, the ultimate Earth-lovers, I like Marcia Bjornerud's writing, she's great.
This article by her that was just published in Aeon, "How to make mountains," is quite a tour de force, telling the story of how geologists came to understand how mountain-building works while at the same time covering some fascinating examples of how people's thinking can get so buried in abstract theory it loses touch with reality.
It seems doubly strange for geologists to have gone down that rabbit hole, to where theory overwhelmed reality. Geology back then was categorized, by those who were unfamiliar with it, as a "descriptive" science, just a system for classifying rocks and fossils into their correct boxes. And yet here were these theory-driven scientists refining their abstract system of geosynclines and anticlinoriums while overlooking what the rocks were telling them.
Theory ruling over reality, to the point that facts that don't support the theory get dismissed, is actually an old problem, or tension, in science. It's not necessarily a dead-end way of thinking. Sometimes the theory proves out and the data turns out to have been misinterpreted. But the geosyncline theory, though based on useful insights and correlations at first, by the end was stuck in the mud, unable to get the Earth to move sideways or upward as it must to make mountains.
One thing Marcia does not mention is that even today, in papers published in the peer-reviewed geology literature, a couple of words left over from the debunked geosyncline theory are still used, miogeocline and eugeocline.
I don't like those words, tainted as they are with the dead-end theory they came from, but words have a history of their own and perhaps they can serve a good function despite being born in a bad family.
Of Dr. Bjornerud's books, I like the more recent Timefulness better than Reading the Rocks, perhaps because, despite what Marcia has told people about how she writes for non-geologist friends, as she matures as a writer she is writing more and more like she thinks, instead of like she's teaching an introductory geology class.
To my mind, the ways of thinking about the Earth that Bjornerud presents in Timefulness are a key to thriving, or maybe just surviving, the rapid changes that the Earth is undergoing in response to our presence.
This article by her that was just published in Aeon, "How to make mountains," is quite a tour de force, telling the story of how geologists came to understand how mountain-building works while at the same time covering some fascinating examples of how people's thinking can get so buried in abstract theory it loses touch with reality.
It seems doubly strange for geologists to have gone down that rabbit hole, to where theory overwhelmed reality. Geology back then was categorized, by those who were unfamiliar with it, as a "descriptive" science, just a system for classifying rocks and fossils into their correct boxes. And yet here were these theory-driven scientists refining their abstract system of geosynclines and anticlinoriums while overlooking what the rocks were telling them.
Theory ruling over reality, to the point that facts that don't support the theory get dismissed, is actually an old problem, or tension, in science. It's not necessarily a dead-end way of thinking. Sometimes the theory proves out and the data turns out to have been misinterpreted. But the geosyncline theory, though based on useful insights and correlations at first, by the end was stuck in the mud, unable to get the Earth to move sideways or upward as it must to make mountains.
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| Image from Aeon magazine online, https://aeon.co/essays/when-geology-left-solid-ground-how-mountains-came-to-be. |
One thing Marcia does not mention is that even today, in papers published in the peer-reviewed geology literature, a couple of words left over from the debunked geosyncline theory are still used, miogeocline and eugeocline.
I don't like those words, tainted as they are with the dead-end theory they came from, but words have a history of their own and perhaps they can serve a good function despite being born in a bad family.
Of Dr. Bjornerud's books, I like the more recent Timefulness better than Reading the Rocks, perhaps because, despite what Marcia has told people about how she writes for non-geologist friends, as she matures as a writer she is writing more and more like she thinks, instead of like she's teaching an introductory geology class.
To my mind, the ways of thinking about the Earth that Bjornerud presents in Timefulness are a key to thriving, or maybe just surviving, the rapid changes that the Earth is undergoing in response to our presence.
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