Clarence King's Geology

Abstract

Clarence King (1842-1901) studied geology at Yale, served as a volunteer on Josiah Dwight Whitney's (1819-1896) Geological Survey of California, and directed the Fortieth Parallel Survey (1867-1872) from the Sierra Nevada across the Rocky Mountains, topo-graphically and geologically mapping some 100,000 square miles. He established a framework for orogenic history of the American Cordillera that has remained unchanged. Within this framework he recognized what we know today as the Sonoma, Sevier, and Laramide orogenies. He noted that folding of Paleozoic strata in the Great Basin recorded east-west crustal shortening, he delineated trends of Laramide folds, he determined that extensional Tertiary faulting that accompanied rhyolitic volcanism resulted in dislocation of old folds, and that ranges were broken into irregular blocks with considerable vertical displacement. King rejected strict Lyellian uniformitarianism and related Darwinian evolution to episodes of enhanced selection pressure engendered by natural catastrophes. His refinement to 24 Ma (million years) of Kelvin's earth age estimate from terrestrial refrigeration reinforced his conception that inadequate time existed to explain the Fortieth-Parallel geologic record by uniformitarianism, and that accelerated geologic processes best accounted for episodes of uplift/subsidence, faulting, volcanism, and landscape degradation. King thus stands out as an early actualist, quite modern in his approach to event stratigraphy.