How The Geology Of Mountains Made America Great

The story of the Appalachians started almost half a billion years ago. The first British colonialists arrived to North America just 400 years ago and yet both events are connected and shaped the history of the United States. Without a series of orogenic cycles 490-300 million years ago, caused by the continental collision assembling the super-continent Pangaea and forming the geological roots of the Appalachians, maybe today there would be the United States of Canada, bordering to the south with the Spanish-American Empire.

The first British colonialists arrived to America in 1607 and were confined by the mountains to the Atlantic coastal plains. The parallel north-south trending ridges of the Appalachians, formed by tilted and folded layers, were a difficult terrain, not suited for permanent settlements and of no use to the first farmers. 

Fig.1. Geological Map of Pennsylvania, published in 1858, showing the north-south trending ridges of the Appalachians mountains (source).

Only the French, settling from the North (territory later to become Canada), claimed the Appalachians, establishing a network of outposts for trading fur in the mountains. In the south Florida and the Great Plains were claimed by the Spanish crown as New Spain. 

It seemed that the British were surrounded by both natural as political opponents. However the isolation soon provided decisive. The plains in the Great Appalachian Valley in eastern Pennsylvania provided fertile ground and the population of the colonies grow over time, unnoticed by the French and Spanish. Soon the British expanded westwards in search of new land. This led to a conflict between England and France above the control of the few gaps and mountain passes in the Appalachians. The English colonists were far more numerous and better supplied than the French, having direct access to the sea. The rugged, poorly accessible terrain of the Appalachians proved difficult to defend by the French and allied Indians and were eventually lost to the expanding British colonies.
 

After the end of the French-American War the English crown wanted to limit the colonization and new settlements to the area of the Appalachians, hoping so to avoid further conflicts with the remaining French and Spanish territories. However the unexpected result was a resentment among the British settlers in America. Colonialists became convinced that the crown didn´t care for the political future of the successful expanding colonies. Among other factors, this resentment will contribute to the later Revolutionary War, where the American colonies will declare their independence, leading in the end to the foundation of the United States of America.
 

Bibliography:
 

ALESHIRE, P. (2008): The Extreme Earth - Mountains. Chelsea House Publishers: 144

April 18, 1906: San Francisco´s Wicked Ground

“O, promised land
O, wicked ground
Build a dream
Tear it down

O, promised land
What a wicked ground
Build a dream
Watch it all fall down”
“San Andreas Fault”

Sailors on board of the “Wellington“, just entering the bay of San Francisco, noted something unusual in the early morning hours of April 18, 1906. The captain reported later that the ship “shivered and shook like a springless wagon on a corduroy road” even if the sea was as “smooth as glass.“

Clarence Judson was swimming near Ocean Beach when he suddenly was pulled by a strong current into the sea. He made it back to the shacking shores.

“I tried to run to where I left my shoes, hat and bathrobe ... but I guess I must have described all kinds of figures in the sand.“

In Washington Street, police sergeant Jesse Cook observed a terrifying spectacle:

“The whole street ... It was as if the waves of the ocean were coming towards me,  ...[]... Davis Street split right open in front of me, []… A gaping trench. . . about six feet deep and half full of water. Suddenly ...[]... the walls of the building began to shake. Before I could get into the shelter of the doorway the walls had actually fallen inward.“

George Davidson, professor for Geography, woke up from the tumult coming from the streets. He grabbed his watch on the desk and noted the length of a first quake – 60 seconds – followed by a second – again 20 to 40 seconds long. His observations – 5:12am in the morning – will later be used to determinate the official time of the great earthquake of San Francisco. Many people were still asleep and killed in their beds, those who escaped gathered in the streets. Despite the earthquake, most of the city seemed still intact and surprisingly quiet.
In 1906 San Francisco was already considered a great, but also corrupt, city with more than 400.000 inhabitants. Thanks to the discovery of gold in the rivers of California the city was quickly expanding into its surroundings. It was an important gateway to the Pacific and a modern trade place. The newest technology in film equipment was available in the shops. The earthquake of San Francisco will become the first natural disaster of this magnitude to be so well documented by photographs and film footage (even in color).
However, most buildings in San Francisco were poorly constructed and made of wood. San Francisco had burned to the ground six times in the past century and experienced strong earthquakes in 1865 and 1868, when 30 people were killed.

“Earthquakey Times“, a caricature by Ed Jump of the October 8, 1865 earthquake in San Francisco. While he was working as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco, Mark Twain experienced the earthquake which he describes in his 1872 book “Roughing It.” – “It was just after noon, on a bright October day. I was coming down Third Street. The only objects in motion anywhere . . . were a man in a buggy behind me, and a [horse-drawn] streetcar wending slowly up the cross street. . . . As I turned the corner, around a frame house, there was a great rattle and jar. . . . Before I could turn and seek the door, there came a terrific shock; the ground seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing together. I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow. . . A third and still severer shock came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing, I saw a sight! The entire front of a tall four-story brick building on Third Street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the street, raising a great dust-like volume of smoke! And here came the buggy-overboard went the man, and in less time than I can tell it the vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of street. . . . The streetcar had stopped, the horses were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends. . . . Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded. . . . For some days afterward, groups of eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long zig-zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground...”

Police sergeant Jesse Cook was the first person to report a fire in a grocery in Clay Street. An hour later there were already fifty fires spotted in the entire city. The firefighters realized horrified that the water pipes in the underground were broken and the hydrants useless. The resulting firestorm will burn three days and will destroy 90 percent of the 28.000 buildings in San Francisco.

Journalist Arnold Genthe will take one of the most famous photos in history. 

“I found that my hand cameras had been so damaged by the falling plaster as to be rendered useless. I went to Montgomery Street to the shop of George Kahn, my dealer, and asked him to lend me a camera. “Take anything you want. This place is going to burn up anyway.” I selected the best small camera, a 3A Kodak Special. I stuffed my pockets with films and started out….”

“Looking Down Sacramento Street, San Francisco, April 18. 1906“, photography by Arnold Genthe.

In Jackson Street, the owner of the “Hotaling´s Whiskey” distillery decides to fight the flames. He pays 80 men to sprinkle 5.000 barrels of whiskey with water pumped out from the sewer system. Later he will mock all those who claim that the earthquake was sent by god by coining a new advertising slogan for his company.

“If, as some say, God spanked the town, for being over frisky – why did He burn the churches down and save Hotaling´s Whiskey?“

Army troops were soon ordered into the city to help the firefighters and prevent panic and looting. Despite the fact that martial law was never proclaimed, the major authorized policeman and soldiers to shoot looting persons – “Obey orders or get shot” was the grim warning on the signboards.
Guion Dewey, a businessman from Virginia, wandering the streets of downtown San Francisco minutes after the quake, experienced the best and worst of human behavior, as he later wrote in a letter to his mother:

“I saw innocent men shot down by the irresponsible militia. I walked four miles to have my jaw set. A stranger tried to make me accept a $10 gold piece. I was threatened with death for trying to help a small girl drag a trunk from a burning house, where her father and mother had been killed. A strange man gave me raw eggs and milk . . . (the first food I had had for twenty-two hours). I saw a soldier shoot a horse because its driver allowed it to drink at a fire hose which had burst. I had a Catholic priest kneel by me in the park as I lay on a bed of alfalfa hay, covered with a piece of carpet, and pray to the Holy Father for relief for my pain. . . . I saw a poor woman, barefoot, told to “Go to Hell and be glad for it” for asking for a glass of milk at a dairyman’s wagon; she had in her arms a baby with its legs broken. I gave her a dollar and walked with her to the hospital. . . .I was pressed into service by an officer, who made me help to strike tents in front of the St. Francis Hotel when the order was issued to dynamite all buildings in the vicinity to save the hotel. I like him and hope to meet him again. When he saw I was hurt, which I had not told him, not yet having been bandaged, he took me to his own tent and gave me water and brandy and a clean handkerchief.“

The earthquake and the firestorms killed an estimated 3.000 to 4.000 people, destroyed 28.000 buildings and the infrastructure of the entire city. However, thanks to a quick rebuilt, just three years later most of San Francisco looked as if the earthquake never happened.

Seismology was still a young scientific discipline at the time of the earthquake in San Francisco. Worldwide there were only 96 seismographs operating, none of these in California. In the aftermath of the disaster, only three days later, the Governor of California announced the formation of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission, led by geologist Andrew C. Lawson of the University of California.
The commission focused on the San Andreas Rift, a nearby valley until then considered of minor interest and mapped geologically only in short sections. For two years Lawson and his team followed the rift, mapping ponds, streams and hills on foot and horseback. They recognized that the rift follows almost the entire coastline of California for more than 1.000 kilometers. During the April 18, earthquake, almost 480 kilometers of this large fault suddenly ruptured, displacing large sections horizontally, not vertically, as geologists had previously believed to be the source of earthquakes. The commission discovered that earthquakes can be generated also along so-called strike-slip faults.
The epicenter of the earthquake was at first located at the point with the largest observed displacement on land. However, today the epicenter is believed to be situated in the Pacific Ocean, in accordance with the seismic waves coming from the sea as observed by the first eyewitnesses.
The results of the scientific investigation of the San Francisco earthquake led Henry Fielding Reid, a geology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, to propose a new theory regarding the origin of earthquakes, later dubbed the “theory of elastic rebound“. Reid’s hypothesis will have a revolutionary impact on the young science of seismology.

Sources:

SLAVICEK, L.C. (2008): The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. Great Historic Disasters. Chelsea House Publishers: 128
STARR, J.D. (1907): The California Earthquake of 1906. A.M. Robertson, San Francisco

Clash of the Titans: The Science behind the Iceberg that sank the Titanic

The tragedy of the “unsinkable” Titanic – lost in the cold water of the Atlantic – became part of history and pop culture, but the story of the main culprit that caused the disaster is mostly forgotten and only vague descriptions and some photos exists of the supposed iceberg(s). One famous photography taken from board of the cable ship “Minia“, one of the first ships to reach the area in search for debris and bodies, shows a tabular iceberg, an unusual shape for icebergs in the northern Atlantic. The crew found debris and bodies floating in the vicinity and the captain assured that this was the only iceberg near the point of the collision. However most surviving Titanic testimonies described later the infamous iceberg with a prominent peak or even two.

Fig.1. The moment of the collision according to the sailor Frederick Fleet - one of the two men on duty as lookout in the night of the disaster (after EATON & HAAS 1986).

Fig.2. Journalist Colin Campbell, a passenger of the "Carpathia" - the first ship to approach the scene of the disaster the next morning and save the surviving passengers of the Titanic - described the iceberg for the "New York Tribune" (after EATON & HAAS 1986).

Fig.3. One of the many icebergs photographed in the morning of April 15, 1912. The passengers on the ship “Prinz Adalbert”, still unaware of the disaster of the previous night, reported later to have noted a “red smear” at the waterline of the white iceberg.

Fig.4. Photography of an iceberg from the cable ship "Minia", one of the first ships to reach the area in search for debris and bodies. The crew found debris and bodies floating in the vicinity of the depicted iceberg and the captain assured that this was the only iceberg near the scene of the collision (after Titanic & Nautical Resource Center).

Fig.5. Another iceberg, photographed five days later from board of the German ship “Bremen”, claimed to be the Titanic iceberg based on the vicinity to the location of the disaster and the description of the iceberg according to survivors. An "authentic" photography of the iceberg that sank theTitanic was worth a lot of money for the eager press, this also explain why so many photographs of icebergs were taken at the time.

Fig.6. Photography taken from board of the ship “Birma” of the same iceberg as seen by the passengers of the “Carpathia” (see also Fig.2.) – the first ship to approach the scene of the disaster and save the surviving passengers of the Titanic – and published at the time in the “Daily Sketch”. This iceberg has in fact some remarkable similarities to the iceberg as described by survivors of the disaster.  
Despite the question if one of the photos shows really the culprit iceberg, the remarkably number of spotted icebergs emphasizes the notion that in 1912 a quite impressive number of these white titans reached such southern latitudes.

The icebergs encountered in the North Atlantic originate mainly from the western coasts of Greenland, where ice streams deliver large quantities of ice in the fjords which lead to the Baffin Bay. Every year ten-thousand of small and large pieces of ice drop from the front of the glaciers and are pushed by the West Greenland Current slowly to northern latitudes, far away from ship routes. Following first the coast of Greenland this current is diverted by the Canadian coast to the south, forming the Labrador Current that circumnavigates Newfoundland and delivers the iceberg to the warm Gulf Stream. A more than 5.000km long journey full of obstacles and incessant erosion by the sun, the water and the waves. Only estimated 1 to 2% of large icebergs will, after a period of 1-3 years, reach latitude 45°N, crossing one of the most important route for ships of the entire Atlantic Ocean.

Fig.7. Schematic map of marine currents (blue= cold; red = hot) around Greenland, probable region of origin (West Greenland) and hypothetical route of the iceberg that hit the Titanic.

Apparently in 1912 icebergs were spotted remarkably often in this region and various hypotheses tried to explain this “anomaly”.  The years before 1912 were characterized by mild winters in Europe and possibly the northern Atlantic. It was therefore speculated that the (relative) warm temperatures increased the melting rate and activity of the calving glaciers on Greenland. 
Also a strengthened Labrador Current, pushing cold water and icebergs much more to the south, was proposed to explain the ice field that in the cold night 100 years ago forced various ships to stop along the Atlantic route. 
Both  hypotheses are based on the recorded values of Sea Surface Temperature (see this diagram by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), which show an alternation of a warm and cold period  in 1900-1920.
A recent hypothesis – promoted by NG – proposes that an exceptional high tide prevented much of the larger icebergs to run, as normally would happen, on ground along the coasts of Baffin Bay. However considering that this tide occurred just some months before (January 1912) and the average velocity of an iceberg is low (0,7km/h~0,6mph), the Titanic iceberg had to take a straight course to arrive in time for his rendezvous with history – April 14, 1912.

Based on iceberg counts along the shores of Labrador and later in the Atlantic, also the year 1912 don’t seem to be necessarily such an anomalous event, but the disaster raised considerably the interest (and maybe perception) of the public for icebergs.

Fig.8. Iceberg counts (estimated before 1912) at 48°N, data compiled from the International Ice Patrol Iceberg Database.

In the days after the disaster bypassing ships encountered and photographed various icebergs. Some eyewitnesses claim to have noted red paint on some of them; however there is no conclusive evidence that one of these spotted white giants is really the iceberg that sank the Titanic. At least some weeks later the culprit iceberg, captured by the warm water of the Gulf Stream, melted and disappeared forever into the Atlantic Ocean.

Bibliography:

EATON, J.P. & HAAS, C.A. (1986): Titanic Triumph and Tragedy. Haynes Publishing: 352
SOUTH, C. et al. (2006): The Iceberg That Sank the Titanic. The Natural World documentary film – BBC

Charles Lyell´s Quite Futile Hunt for the Sea-Serpent

In October 1845 British geologist Charles Lyell was visiting Boston, when he noted an advertisement proclaiming that a “Dr.” Albert C. Koch would exhibit the 114-foot-long skeleton of “that colossal and terrible reptile the sea serpent” to the paying public. Lyell exposed this claim soon as a fraud, as the skeleton was in fact composed from the bones of the extinct whale Zeuglodon, described by Richard Owen just some years earlier.

Fig.1. The infamous “Hydrarchos” by German fossil collector Albert Koch as displayed in New York. Not only was the animal composed of various specimens of the extinct whale Zeuglodon, but in this illustration even the size of the supposed skeleton is exaggerated.  Image from FOWLER (1846): “The American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany”.

Like many other Victorian naturalists Lyell showed great interest in the supposed existence of large marine monsters. A good friend of Lyell, Canadian geologist John William Dawson, informed him of  a sighting in August 1845 at Merigomish, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here two “intelligent” testimonies had observed a 100-foot-long sea snake with humps on the back and the head similar to a seal. Lyell describes this sighting in his book “Second Visit to the United States of North America” (1849) and adds that stories about unusual encounters abound along the west coast of the U.S. He mentions even that a young sea serpent was still preserved in spirits in the Museum of New Haven. However Lyell, seeing the specimen for himself, agreed with other skeptics that it was nothing more than a land snake (Coluber constrictor) with a deformed spine.

Fig.2. Newspaper from Boston with an article about the strange, but true, encounter with the Mountauk Monster – sea serpent in 1817.

Despite the lack of evidence, Lyell confess in his writings that he remains optimistic “for I believed in the sea serpent without having seen it.”

At Lyell’s time the birth and age of earth was still a controversial topic. Most geologists assumed a gradual formation of earth, characterized by constant progress until the human epoch. In contrast Lyell postulated two important principles for geologic time – processes observable today were active also in the remote past and time is (similar to the motion of the stars) organized in cycles. Large marine reptiles (like the Ichthyosaur or Plesiosaur), but also large marine mammals (like the Zeuglodon), were known to have existed in the past. Their continuous existence would provide biological – and therefore independent – evidence for his geo-theory.
Assuming sea serpents were never captured alive in historic times as they were very rare and almost extinct, the supposed rise in population during the 19th century (as, so Lyell, this could explain the rise in sightings since 1817) was a result of  earth’s history repeating itself. The large prehistoric reptiles of the past, almost gone during the last ice age, would again rise to conquer a warmer world.

Lyell was not the only geologist searching for the mythical sea snake, as many naturalists at the time considered (or explained) monsters as survivors of a former world. However Lyell was aware about the controversy surrounding the topic. In the end he never published such accounts to support his geo-theory and probably it would have done more harm than good to include sea serpents and other monsters in a textbook about geology.

Fig.3. The Ichthyosaurus, only to be found in the museum? The discovery of bones and description of prehistoric beasts boosted the sightings of supposed sea and lake monsters during the 19th century, caricature published in 1885 in the Punch magazine.

Bibliography:

CLIFFORD, D.; WADGE, E.; WARWICK, A. & WILLIS, M. (eds.) (2006): Repositioning Victorian Sciences – Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Thinking. Anthem Press: 300
GLENDENING, J. (2009): ‘The World-Renowned Ichthyosaurus’: A Nineteenth-Century Problematic and Its Representations. Journal of Literature and Science. Vol.2 (1): 23-47
LYONS, L..S. (2010): Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age. State University of New York Press: 260
SWITEK, B. (2010): Written in Stone – Evolution, the Fossil Record, and our Place in Nature. Bellevue Literary Press – New York: 320

Love Can Move Mountains

January 11, 1996 a single seismograph of the Geological Survey of Canada buried in a quiet wooded area on central Vancouver Island started to record an unusual strong seismic signal – slowly, but perpetually increasing in amplitude over time it was recorded only at this station – nearby station (located within a radius of 20km) didn´t show any movements – this was no ordinary 6.8 magnitude earthquake as could occur along the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Fig.1. Seismogram showing a segment of the unusual seismic signal, from CASSIDY & WHITFORD 1996.

After one-half hour there was a sudden increase in intensity of the signal. The geologists at the Pacific Geoscience Centre in Sidney, 125 km distant of the seismograph position and monitoring the unusual signal, decided to call the police and a nearby a public school to check the situation.

Meanwhile the signal amplitude continued to increase – and an ever increasing number of puzzled technicians and scientist gathered around the monitoring equipment at the Geoscience Centre. At 4:28 PM – 43 minutes after the unusual recording was first noted – the signal suddenly stopped.

Later it was confirmed that it was exactly at 4:28 PM that the police officers and the school staff arrived at the seismograph site, where they found a young couple, trembling in passion and the source of the recorded Love Waves and supposed man-made quake…

Bibliography:

CASSIDY, J.F. & WHITFORD, A. (1996): Unusual “Love Waves” Recorded Above the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Seismological Research Letters. Vol. 67(6): 49-51

Geology and Generals: How Geology influenced the Gettysburg Campaign (Part I.)

“Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.” The Art of War, by Sun Tzù

In 1863, after more than two years of Civil War, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia launches a decisive attack towards the north, in direction of the town of Harrisburg in Pennsylvania. Spotted by the Union Army a skirmish near the small farm town of Gettysburg starts, soon escalating into one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history. In three days (July 1 to July 3) nearly 50.000 Americans were killed or wounded.  The outcome of this military campaign and battle was strongly influenced by geological events almost one billion years in the making.

Dinosaurs enter the Atomic Age

Monsters in monster movies - they are the antagonist of our hero, the threat to society, the key element of the movie - we despise and love them at the same time.

The monster movie can be created by human folly - an experiment gone wrong, the destruction or the violation of an isolated habitat - or on purpose as a biological weapon.
The monsters can came from space: actively searching habitable planets or hosts for its lifecycle or it was brought back as sample or unwillingly from a space mission.
This last origin can be mixed or being replaced by the explanation that the monsters came from a different time period, usually the past - trough a time warp or surviving entrapped in ice, mud or on a lost island.

All these different births of monsters reflect the technology and the fear by society of this technology at the time. A classic example of this correlation is the decade of 1950 to 1960. "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" is considered the first movie to introduce the atomic bomb as possibility to create monsters - that will go wild. 

Fig.1. The "Rhedosaurus" - first evil dinosaur-star?

The movie was produced by the small independent company "Mutual Pictures", Warner Brothers recognized the potential and released it in 1953, 8 years after the first U.S. atomic bombs and 4 years after the first Soviet atomic test, just at the beginning of the arm race between the two superpowers. First test previously of 1948 and released footage of the test sites at the lagoons of Bikini had already showed to the public the devastating effects of the heat and the radiation of an atomic blast on living animals - the movie is based on and also exploits this fear. 



 
In the movie during "Operation Experiment" (how inventive by the scriptwriters...) an atomic bomb will be detonated in the atmosphere over the Arctic, the producers used real footage of real nuclear blasts- a common trick to save costs, but maybe also to emphasize the "reality" of the story. The movie introduces the classic scientists and their pseudoscientific techno-babble, an element that will become standard until modern movies.
"20,000 Fathoms" is also one of the first movies to introduce animals/dinosaurs as the main monster - breaking with the tradition of human-like creatures of the early 20th century - and inspire an entire bunch of later movies that will explain the origin of the monsters from misuse of radioactive radiation or contamination of harmless organisms. 
The "Rhedosaurus" is awakened by the nuclear blast from the arctic ice and goes on to terrorize and destroy entire cities, the military and all the weapons can´t apparently stop it.

Fig.2. Timeline of nuclear test and important movies of the monster genre, note the decade 1950-1960. "The Valley of Gwangi" in 1969 is considered an effort to revitalize the - at the time - dying genre, by introducing western elements in a classic monster story.

Strangely it is a nuclear scientist that will solve the problem - displaying the contradictory relationship of society to the atomic energy at the time - it causes problems but also can solve them. However this somehow positive message of "20,000 Fathoms" will go lost in subsequent movies, when the monsters created by the atom will only cause havoc and suffering.

Video: Footage of the animal tests codenamed "Plumbbob" (1957)  - WARNING Graphic Content!



Bibliography:

EVANS, J.A. (1998): Celluloid Mushroom Clouds - Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb. Critical Studies in Communication and in the Cultural Industries; Westview Press: 212

Marie Tharp: The map that changed the world

"The tiny fringe of shallow sunlit waters which has been so frequently treated in books and films is entirely excluded, for in this book we are concerned only with the sunless and little-known abyss which claims over half of the planet."

HEEZEN & HOLLISTER (1971)

Marie Tharp was born July 30, 1920 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Already at very young age she followed her father, a soil surveyor for the United States Department of Agriculture, into the field. However she also loved to read and decided to study literature at St John's College in Annapolis, but at the time women were not admitted to study there. So she went to Ohio University, where she graduated in 1943. 

The Second World War changed dramatically the situation in the United States - the nation needed highly educated replacement for the men who went into war, women now were encouraged to choose degrees also in science and technology. Marie enrolled in a petroleum geology programme, becoming so a "Petroleum Geology Girl" she graduated in geology in 1944. Afterwards she worked for a short time in the petroleum industry, however she found the work unrewarding and decided to resume her studies at Tulsa University. 

In 1948 she graduated in mathematics and found work at the Lamont Geological Laboratory of Columbia University. The atmosphere there was relaxed and friendly; also in times of Cold War money for geological projects studying the ocean floor, which results promised to be important for the war with submarines, was abundant. 

She began a prolific collaboration with geologist Bruce Charles Heezen (1924 -1977), who was specialized on the gathering of seismic and topographic data from the sea floor. As women Marie was not allowed on board of the research vessels crossing over the sea to collect profiles of the seafloor, so she started to calculate, interpret and visualize the data when Heezen was on the sea. She co-authored with Heezen a book and various papers; however her role was often neglected. Her employment despite continuous remained insecure, in certain moments the bureaucracy and financial troubles forced her to work from home. 

Between 1959 until the death of Heezen in 1977 she worked strenuously on various maps that would depict the still unknown topography of the oceanic basins - and the results were astounding. The ocean floor was not a flat plain of mud, as previously imagined, but displayed mountains, ridges and canyons, sometimes larger and deeper than any feature found on the continents. The most impressive feature however was a chain of mountains cutting in half the large basins of the oceans - Tharp and Heezen had discovered the backbone of earth, the Mid-Ocean Ridges.

Fig.1. "I was so busy making maps I let them argue,...[]" (photography published in HEEZEN & HOLLISTER 1971). Both Heezen and Tharp recognized the Mid-Ocean Ridges as spreading centres of the oceanic crust; both tended to consider this a result of an expanding globe. Marie Tharp´s cartographic accomplishments were exceptional because she overcame educational and employment barriers that limited opportunities for women of her generation. Without doubts she prepared the field for other researchers; however she will not became directly identified with the era's most revolutionary geological theory  - plate tectonics.

Bibliography:

BARTON, C. (2002): Marie Tharp, oceanographic cartographer, and her contributions to the revolution in the Earth sciences. In OLDROYD, D.R. (ed.) The Earth Inside and Out: Some Major Contributions to Geology in the Twentieth Century. Geological Society Special Publications 192, London: 215-228
HEEZEN, B.C. & HOLLISTER, C. D. (1971): The face of the deep. Oxford Univ. Press, New York, London, and Toronto: 659

In Megalonyx We Trust: Jefferson's patriotic monsters

During the transition of the 18th to the 19th century earth sciences experienced a major revolution - the principles of the modern identification of rocks was introduced and sediments subdivided by the content of embedded fossils. Animals of the past apparently differed from modern ones in their abundance and in their diversity (so they could be used to subdivide the stratigraphic column) and some organisms were completely unknown to modern scholars. These observations led to a major problem: if these organisms are today unknown, are they surviving in remote regions of the globe and yet not discovered?
Classic monsters, like sea serpents along the shores of North America, the giant kraken along the shores of Africa and even sirens in the sea surrounding the United Kingdom, were spotted and depicted in books for centuries (and still today), but now naturalists responded with scepticism and reluctance to these stories - reports coming from America were soon considered as "Yankee Humbug" by European scholars.

In 1812 Georges Cuvier proclaimed that there was little hope to discover new species of large tetrapods and regarding the efforts of explorers to track down mythical animals he noted:

"…we hope that nobody thinks to search them for real, it would be like searching the animals of Daniel or the beasts of the apocalypse. Let us not even search for the mythical animals of the Persians, results of an even greater imagination."

In 1796 the third president of the United States, also president of the American Philosophical Society and naturalist Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) studied some fossil bones and a giant claw discovered during mining activities in a cave.
March 10, 1797 he presented the results to the Philosophical Society under the title "A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia" and concluded that these remains belong to a giant felid " three times as large as the lion" which he named "Megalonyx" (great claw).

Fig.1. Engraving of the bones of the foot, toe, and claw of Megalonyx, as published in a paper by Caspar Wistar "A description of the Bones deposited by the President, in the Museum of the Society, and represented in the annexed plates." (1799). Jefferson's Megalonyx paper, which had no illustrations of the bones, was published in the same volume of American Philosophical Society Transactions.

Jefferson, in accordance to the naturalistic knowledge of the time, believed that in nature no species could became extinct, so he continued in his report:

"In the present interior of our continent there is surely space and range enough for elephants and lions, if in that climate they could subsist; and for the mammoth and megalonyxes who may subsist there. Our entire ignorance of the immense country to the West and North-West, and of its contents, does not authorise us so say what is does not contain."

Jefferson based this conclusion in part on anecdotes of woodsmen being terrorized by a large cat-like animal in the wilderness and the presumed representations of lions in Indian rock paintings (possibly the American lion Panthera atrox ?).

However the most important argument for Jefferson was a theological one: if a species can become extinct in a perfect divine creation such a creation can't possibly be so perfect all along, the continuous loss of species would inevitable lead to the end of this imperfect creation.

"The movements of nature are in a never ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should be evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral."

Fig.2. Sketch of the so called "Madrid skeleton" sent to Jefferson by tradesman William Carmichael in 1789. A large skeleton was found near Buenos Aires, in his letter Carmichael notes "I also inclose…a discription of the Skeleton of an Animal discovered lately in Spanish America. I supposed these to be objects of Curiosity to you,…" Jefferson recognized that the bones and claw he had attributed to his large cat Megalonyx were comparable to these of this animal, described in 1796 by Cuvier as Megatherium.
Jefferson also collected all sorts of information about large mammals and bones to support his view of the new continent as populated with fascinating animals as the old continent and rest of the world.

Jefferson also had some political motives to support the existence of large and ferocious animals in the U.S.
In his works the eminent France naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) proposed a theory to explain the worldwide distribution of animal species: from environmental optimal centres species would spread all over the globe, however degenerating in areas with less favourable climate or environment - and according to Buffon the fauna of America was an perfect example of such a degenerated European and African fauna.
This worldview not only offended Jefferson's personal feelings, but also seriously damaged the reputation of the young United States of America. The U.S. needed the political and financial support of France during the Revolutionary Wars (1775-1783), Buffon was however popularizing the perception that "America is an excessively cold and humid continent where big animals cannot survive, domestic animals become scrawny, and men become stupid and lose their sexual vigor" (ROWLAND 2009)

In spring 1785 Jefferson published anonymous his "Notes on the State of Virginia", where he discussed naturalistic and also political facts of this state. In various lists he compared the mammals of the new continent to the mammals of the old continent, concluding that the body mass and diversity of American animals was far superior then envisaged by Buffon. He also reaffirmed his view on the impossibility of extinction:

"The bones of the Mammoth which have been found in America, are as large as those found in the old world. It may be asked, why I insert the Mammoth, as if it still existed? I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist?
Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken. To add to this, the traditionary testimony of the Indians, that this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America, would be adding the light of a taper to that of the meridian sun. Those parts still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones."

In 1803 Jefferson organized the famous Lewis and Clark expedition; apart political important tasks, like the geographical exploration of Louisiana and the search for a navigable passage to the Pacific, this expedition should also dig for fossils and search for the supposed unknown large tetrapods of North America.

Jefferson in his lifetime never really embraced the theory of extinction, probably as a results of personal religious beliefs and political agenda - only in the mid 19th century extinction will become a scientific fact.

Bibliography:

ROWLAND, S.M. (2009): Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In ROSENBERG, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203: 225-246

Online Resources:

MURPHY, D.C. (): Fossils and Extinction. The Academy of Natural Sciences. (Accessed 15.08.2011)
MURPHY, D.C. (): Discovering The Great Claw: Part 1 - The Giant Cat. The Academy of Natural Sciences. (Accessed 15.08.2011)

Channeled Scabland and the Spokane Flood

The landscape of eastern Washington shows some unique landforms that already in the early 20th century fascinated geologists:

"No one with an eye for land forms can cross eastern Washington in daylight without encountering and being impressed by the "scabland." Like great scars marring the otherwise fair face to the plateau are these elongated tracts of bare, black rock carved into mazes of buttes and canyons. Everybody on the plateau knows scabland…[]…The popular name is a metaphor. The scablands are wounds only partially healed - great wounds in the epidermis of soil with which Nature protects the underlying rock…[]…The region is unique: let the observer take wings of the morning to the uttermost parts of the earth: he will nowhere find its likeness."
J Harlen Bretz 1928

American geologist J Harlen Bretz (1882-1981) proposed in 1919, in winter of 1922 and in various papers (here and here and here) in 1923 to 1925 a controversial hypothesis to explain the landscape - a flood episode of very great extant and amount:

"The volume of the invading waters much exceeds the capacity of the existing streamways. The valleys entered become river channels, they brim over into neighboring ones, and minor divides within the system are crossed in hundreds of places.
The topographic features produced during this episode are wholly river-bottom modifications of the invaded and overswept drainage network of hills and valleys. Hundreds of cataract ledges, of basins and canyons eroded into bed rock, of isolated buttes of the bed rock, of gravel bars piled high above the valley floors, and of island hills of the weaker overlying formations are left at the cessation of this episode…[]…Everywhere the record is of extraordinary vigorous sub-fluvial action. The physiographic expression of the region is without parallel; it is unique, this channelled scabland of the Columbia Plateau."
J Harlen Bretz 1928

The fluvial or glacial origin of the scablands was already clear from the observed features - deep incised gorges, steep cliffs or former waterfalls and cataracts, hanging valleys, eroded bedrock and widespread erratic boulders.
In 1838 Reverend Samuel Parker explained the scablands as the former river valleys of the Columbia River and in 1882 during a topographic survey Lieutenant T.W. Symons proposed that the river changed direction by a former ice-shield blocking its path. In alternative Thomas Condon in 1902 imagined a flood coming from the sea with the erratic boulders transported by drift ice.

Fig.1. Bristow, H.G. (1872) "The world before the deluge by Louis Figuier", showing the transport of boulders enclosed in drift ice.

Bretz in 1919 proposed a freshwater flood coming from the interior of the North American continent and following in part the path of the late Pleistocene Columbia River. However he couldn't explain the origin of the water - there were two possibilities, a rapid warming of the climate causing the melting of the Laurentian ice shield or a "jokulloup" caused by volcanic eruptions under the ice.

Fig.2. Hypothesized submergence map of the lower Columbia River system, after BRETZ 1919.

The proposed hypothesis arouse so much interest that on 12, January 1927 a meeting of the Geological Society of Washington with the title "Channeled Scabland and the Spokane Flood" was organized.
The main criticism in the following discussion concentrated on the problem of the estimated huge amount of water required (not explainable by the proposed mechanisms) and the short interval involved in the formation of the scablands (the various mapped spillways could have formed at various moments).
Research done and published some years previously by geologist Joseph T. Pardee (1871-1960) helped to solve this mystery. Pardee had mapped the outlines of a gigantic ice-dammed lake, comprising an area extending from today's north-western Washington to Idaho and Montana, which he named Lake Missoula (in fact there were various lakes dammed up by various ice lobes and named today Lake Missoula and Columbia/Spokane).
In 1933 the International Geological Congress field trip led to the Channeled Scablands, dividing the community in supporters and opponents of the flood-hypothesis.
In 1940 the American Association for the Advancement of Science met in Seattle, in the session "Quaternary Geology of the Pacific Northwest" most contributions were against the flood, but again Pardee proposed an interesting paper entitled "Ripple marks (?) in glacial Lake Missoula", where he described extraordinary large gravel ripples (15m high and with a wavelength of 150m) found in a basin of Montana. These ripple marks were a strong evidence supporting a catastrophic flood draining Lake Missoula, providing the necessary great amounts of water to explain the erosion of the scablands.

In the following decades Bretz continued to collect geologic information about the extant of the Spokane flood and finally in the decade of 1960 to 1970 the flood hypothesis convinced definitively the geologic community.

Bibliography:

BAKER, V.R. (2008): The Spokane Flood debates: historical background and philosophical perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications Vol. 301: 33-50
BAKER, V.R. (2009): The Channeled Scabland: A Retrospective. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. Vol.37(6): 1-19
BRETZ, J. H. (1928): Channeled Scabland of eastern Washington. Geographical Review, 18: 446–477

Paleomammologist George Gaylord Simpson

"The known specimens of Mesozoic mammals are among the most precious and important remains of extinct life which have yet been discovered. They are the sole direct evidence of the fundamental first two-thirds of evolution of the Class Mammalia, which is now dominant on the earth and to which we ourselves belong. This importance has long been rather vaguely recognized, but it can hardly be said to have been properly evaluated. The Mesozoic forms are usually briefly dismissed as being rare, fragmentary, and poorly understood - accusations which are true, but not in the accepted degree."

Introduction to SIMPSON, G.G. (1929): "American Mesozoic mammals".

George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984) was born in Chicago in a religious family, but already in childhood he rejected religion as childish behaviour and displayed an intense interest in facts.
At age 16 he entered University to become a writer, but in the second year he enrolled in a geology course, and following the advice of his instructor Arthur Tieje he changed to Yale University as the best place to study geology and palaeontology. Here, in the basement of the Peabody Museum, he discovered a large collection of yet not studied Mesozoic mammals, but his advisor, Richard Swann Lull, despite the enthusiasm and abilities displayed by Simpson, mistrusted him: "those fossils are much too important very delicate and highly significant for a young graduate student."
Only in the following year, after a successful field season in Texas and New Mexico, where Simpson discovered fossils of Pliocene and Miocene mammals, Lull permitted Simpson to approach the valuable fossils (and despite one initial accident, when Simpson stumbled over one of the first fossils to be recovered, breaking it).

After his graduation from Yale, Simpson went to the Natural History Museum in London, where he continued his studies on the bones of early mammals, comparing the American to the European species - the results were important monographs of the evolutionary relationships of the various groups.

Fig.2. Figure of the dentition of various American Mesozoic mammals, published in SIMPSON, G.G. (1929): "American Mesozoic mammals", one book in which he summarize the results of his intense studies on fossils from America and Europe.

In 1927 back to America, he joined the American Museum as assistant curator of fossil vertebrates, position inherited from his former mentor.
Simpson continued his work on the taxonomy of mammals, but begun also to introduce theoretical methods and concepts in palaeontology.
In the years 1942 to 1944 he fought in World War II and was sent to Nord Africa, Sicily and Italy, obtaining the rank of major.
After the war he returned to the United States, becoming professor of vertebrate palaeontology at Columbia University and later curator for the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

Simpson popularized palaeontology and evolution with various books for the general public, but also contributed to a general synthesis of evolution by proposing that small genetic variations in populations are in fact the breach on which natural selection can act, and that therefore the observed chance in the fossil record is explainable by evolution. It is again the irony of history that George Gaylord Simpson, like Darwin or Gould, is apparently one of the most quote-mined evolutionists by creationist in the Internet…

Online Resources:

RYAN, M.J. (16.06.2011): Born This Day: George Gaylord Simpson. (Accessed 16.06.2011)
Cover picture from LAPORTE, L.F. (): George Gaylord Simpson - Paleontologist & Evolutionist 1902-1984. (Accessed 16.06.2011)
LAPORTE, L.F. (2004): Rock Stars George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984). GSA TODAY September 2004: 16-17