The Landscape Around Us Was Mostly Shaped in Short Catastrophic Bursts, Not Gradual Erosion

The old description of a soldier's experience in wartime - long periods of boredom interrupted by short periods of terror - turns out to be a surprisingly accurate model for how Earth's surface has been shaped over the last 2.5 million years. Randall Carlson applies it directly to the geological record.

The uniformitarian picture of gradual, continuous erosion is not wrong. The Grand Canyon is deepening slowly, year by year, as the Colorado River does its work. But that slow background process is not what produced most of the dramatic geomorphic features preserved in the landscapes around us.

The evidence, Randall argues, points consistently to the short-lived transitions - the catastrophic flood events, the climate crashes, the rapid meltwater pulses - as the periods responsible for the majority of the landscape shaping we can observe. Every 10,000 to 30,000 years, the slow grind is violently interrupted, and more erosion and deposition occurs in days or weeks than the background processes would accomplish in millennia. It is in those moments of terror, not the long periods of boredom, that the face of the Earth is remade.

Join Randall in the field in New York State for his Finger Lakes Tour, Aug 30 Sep 5, 2026