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In the mid-seventeenth century, biblical scholar and Archbishop James Ussher determined that the earth had been created in the year 4004 BCE. Just over a century later James Hutton, known as the father of geology, suggested that the earth was much older and that processes occurring in the present were the same processes that had operated in the past, and would be the processes that operate in the future.
This concept became known as uniformitarianism and can be summarized by the phrase "the present is the key to the past." It was a direct rejection of the prevalent theory of the time, catastrophism, which held that only violent disasters could modify the surface of the earth. Today, we hold uniformitarianism to be true and know that great disasters such as earthquakes, asteroids, volcanoes, and floods are part of the regular cycle of the earth.The earth is estimated to be approximately 4.55 billion years old and the planet has certainly had enough time for slow, continuous processes to mold and shape the earth (including the tectonic movement of the continents around the globe). However, we also know that disasters have a profound impact on the landscape.

In 1994, the U.S. National Research Council stated:

It is not known whether the relocation of materials on the surface of the Earth is dominated by the slower but continuous fluxes operating all the time or by the spectacular large fluxes that operate during short-lived cataclysmic events. (Davis, 18)
The rain from a storm slowly erodes the soil, wind moves sand in the Sahara desert, floods change the course of a river, and uniformitarianism unlocks the keys to the past and the future in what occurs today.

For More Information

Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology.
Tinkler, Keith J. A Short History of Geomorphology. Barnes & Noble Books, 1985.
Suggested Reading [continues]

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