This
another blast from the classic canon of geology that at least
appreciates that folk tales are teaching you something even if the
knowledge is profoundly local. Regrettably he appears to completely
miss the reality of the demise of the Great Ice Age lifting sea
levels some 300 feet including at least one sudden surge from
Missoula and surely a second when Hudson Bay emptied. All this has
marked up the terrain.
Mapping
those changes and their inferences has not even begun and we do know
that this is real. Worse, it affects every coastline everywhere and
represents massive land tracts that hugely affected climate. It is a
huge modeling problem that will still need to understand crustal
shift to fully understand the real climate. Otherwise we need a
temperate Amazon which is clearly impossible. Historically, modelers
threw up their hands on this and have not revisited it since. The
problem did not disappear. It is one of many that science chooses to
ignore.
We
have been fairly successful in integrating cultural histories into
the apparent Earth history. The first rule is to listen and trust.
No one passed fable to their children unless it was clearly described
as such. Nor did they get it wrong in terms of their language. Our
problems begin with translation.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 14,
2012) — David Montgomery is a geomorphologist, a geologist who
studies changes to topography over time and how geological processes
shape landscapes. He has seen firsthand evidence of how the forces
that have shaped Earth run counter to some significant religious
beliefs
But the idea that
scientific reason and religious faith are somehow at odds with each
other, he said, "is, in my view, a false dichotomy."
In a new book, "The
Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood" (Aug.
27, 2012, W.W. Norton), Montgomery explores the long history of
religious thinking -- particularly among Christians -- on matters of
geological discovery, from the writings of St. Augustine 1,700 years
ago to the rise in the mid-20th century of the most recent rendering
of creationism.
"The purpose is
not to tweak people of faith but to remind everyone about the long
history in the faith community of respecting what we can learn from
observing the world," he said.
Many of the earliest
geologists were clergy, he said. Nicolas Steno, considered the
founder of modern geology, was a 17th century Roman Catholic priest
who has achieved three of the four steps to being declared a saint in
the church.
"Though there are
notable conflicts between religion and science -- the famous case of
Galileo Galilei, for example -- there also is a church tradition of
working to reconcile biblical stories with known scientific fact,"
Montgomery said.
"What we hear
today as the 'Christian' positions are really just one slice of a
really rich pie," he said.
For nearly two
centuries there has been overwhelming geological evidence that a
global flood, as depicted in the story of Noah in the biblical book
of Genesis, could not have happened. Not only is there not enough
water in the Earth system to account for water levels above the
highest mountaintop, but uniformly rising levels would not allow the
water to have the erosive capabilities attributed to Noah's Flood,
Montgomery said.
Some rock formations
millions of years old show no evidence of such large-scale water
erosion. Montgomery is convinced any such flood must have been, at
best, a regional event, perhaps a catastrophic deluge in Mesopotamia.
There are, in fact, Mesopotamian stories with details very similar,
but predating, the biblical story of Noah's Flood.
"If your world is
small enough, all floods are global," he said.
Perhaps the greatest
influence in prompting him to write "The Rocks Don't Lie"
was a 2002 expedition to the Tsangpo River on the Tibetan Plateau. In
the fertile river valley he found evidence in sediment layers that a
great lake had formed in the valley many centuries ago, not once but
numerous times. Downstream he found evidence that a glacier on
several occasions advanced far enough to block the river, creating
the huge lake.
But ice makes an
unstable dam, and over time the ice thinned and finally give way,
unleashing a tremendous torrent of water down the deepest gorge in
the world. It was only after piecing the story together from
geological evidence that Montgomery learned that local oral
traditions told of exactly this kind of great flood.
"To learn that
the locals knew about it and talked about it for the last thousand
years really jolted my thinking. Here was evidence that a folk tale
might be reality based," he said.
He has seen evidence
of huge regional floods in the scablands of Eastern Washington,
carved by torrents when glacial Lake Missoula breached its ice dam in
Montana and raced across the landscape, and he found Native American
stories that seem to tell of this catastrophic flood.
Other flood stories
dating back to the early inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest and
from various islands in the Pacific Ocean, for example, likely tell
of inundation by tsunamis after large earthquakes.
But he noted that in
some regions of the world -- in Africa, for example -- there are no
flood stories in the oral traditions because there the annual floods
help sustain life rather than bring destruction.
Floods are not always
responsible for major geological features. Hiking a trail from the
floor of the Grand Canyon to its rim, Montgomery saw unmistakable
evidence of the canyon being carved over millions of years by the
flow of the Colorado River, not by a global flood several thousand
years ago as some people still believe.
He describes that hike
in detail in "The Rocks Don't Lie." He also explores
changes in the understanding of where fossils came from, how
geologists read Earth history in layers of rock, and the writings of
geologists and religious authorities through the centuries.
Montgomery hopes the
book might increase science literacy. He noted that a 2001 National
Science Foundation survey found that more than half of American
adults didn't realize that dinosaurs were extinct long before humans
came along.
But he also would like
to coax readers to make sense of the world through both what they
believe and through what they can see for themselves, and to keep an
open mind to new ideas.
"If you think you
know everything, you'll never learn anything," he said.
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