CATASTROPHISM AND NEOCATASTROPHISM VERSUS COSMIC HAZARD: AGER VERSUS ALVAREZ; CUVIER VERSUS LAPLACE

Abstract

In Ted Nield’s book (2011), Derek V. Ager (1923–1993), the famous British paleontologist and stratigrapher, is presented at length by his former student as the father of neocatastrophism. The ideas of violent events and processes as geological agents were revived following a long-term predominance of the paradigm of uniformitarianism (“natural processes are steady across time and space”) and the gradual theory of evolution (e.g., Palmer 2003). The neocatastrophism renaissance by the late twentieth century was paired with the successful emergence of two interconnected concepts: 1) the rare event principle and 2) the bolide impact theory of mass extinction. In fact, the birth of both these ideas took place 220 years ago. In his thought-provoking books, Ager (1973, 1993) emphasized the concept of infrequent events in Earth history, with credit given to Peter E. Gretener (1926–2008); incidentally, this priority is totally omitted by Nield (2011). Gretener, a little-known geologist from the University of Calgary, introduced the notion of rare events in a brief article as follows (Gretener 1967, p. 2197): “The rare event is defined as an event with the low probability of a particular interplay of various factors,” but in the several billion years of Earth history “the improbable becomes probable and eventually approaches certainty.” Or, in the funny phrasing of Nield (2011, p. 28), “Given enough time, …one of an infinite number of typing monkeys will eventually write Hamlet. …” This principle was applied by Gretener (1967, 1984) to meteorite impacts (see below), but also concerns other extreme events and episodic agents (“a spasm, an episode, or a punctuation;” Gretener 1984, p. 87). He claimed, “The earth’s history reveals long periods of tranquility interrupted by moments of action” (Gretener 1984, p. 86). And, therefore, Hsu (1989, p. 749) rightly considered the …