Early Geologists Were Catastrophists

The founding fathers of geology were catastrophists. They looked at massive valleys carved through bedrock with tiny rivers meandering along the bottom and drew the only logical conclusion: something much larger once flowed there. They didn't impose millions of years onto a landscape that didn't require it. They looked at the evidence and let it speak. This was geology before uniformitarianism became dogma, before the field decided that only slow processes counted as scientific. These early geologists saw the world as it was: shaped by events of catastrophic scale. The question isn't whether catastrophes happened. The question is why the field spent a century pretending they didn't.