Heretical views on mountain building in Europe and North America: Harbingers of modern tectonics

Abstract

Since Hutton's doctrine of internal dynamics, geologists have striven to find a rationale for the forces that engender mountain ranges. The 19th century vogue in geological opinion came to a consensus of thermal contraction, and ana priori assumption of shrinking of the globe. Outcrop relations were interpreted accordingly. But leading geologists on both sides of the Atlantic soon observed structures not accounted for by the prevailing hypothesis. The Alpine school of mobilism introduced tectonic polarity (Suess, 1875), nappes (Bertrand, 1884), thrust plates (Termier, 1903) and reached its climax with Argand's visionary perception of crustal flux, of closing ocean basins, and of colliding continents. While the nappe theory was being debated in Europe, another controversy with respect to mountain building surfaced in the American West: the derivation of the Basin Ranges (Gilbert, 1876). Just as the early proponents of large-scale crustal shortening felt that they must dissent from established views, so their contemporaries in America paradoxically discovered still another reason for mountain building, namely, that of crustal extension (Russel, 1884;Le Conte, 1889).