An account of Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, pioneer of glacial geology, and flood geologist, Rev. William Buckland: In 1836... [Agassiz] was given a guided tour of glacial phenomena in the Rhone River valley by Charpentier. Aware that Charpentier explained Swiss erratics and gravels as glacial deposits, Agassiz was skeptical at first but quickly became an enthusiastic convert. He immediately undertook extensive field research throughout Europe and the British Isles and had already gleaned sufficient information by the summer of 1837 to create a sensation with a lecture before the Swiss Society of Natural History announcing that vast ice sheets had covered the northern continents all the way to the Mediterranean Sea during the Pleistocene epoch. [63] Not unexpectedly, William Buckland was extremely interested in Agassizs startling hypothesis. Hoping to discount Agassizs new ideas, Buckland participated in one of the most significant field trips in history in October 1838. Agassiz showed Buckland several examples of polished, striated bedrock and transported erratics on the southeastern slopes of the Jura mountains near Neuchatel. Together they examined glaciers in the Alps. Buckland received a firsthand lesson in the capabilities of flowing ice and was convinced that alpine glaciers had once been much more extensive. He informed Agassiz that he had seen similar phenomena in Scotland and England and had attributed them to diluvial action, but he now realized that flowing ice accounted for such features much more satisfactorily than an aqueous catastrophe ever could. Buckland had become a glacialist. [Geoligist Charles] Lyell soon followed. Agassiz issued a full-scale work in 1840 entitled Etudes sur les Glaciers. He, Buckland, and Lyell also gave important papers in late 1840 before the Geological Society of London on the evidence that glaciers had covered Scotland, Ireland, and England in the distant past, pointing out: the widespread occurrence of moraines, shoreline terraces of ancient lakes, and striated and polished bedrock. General skepticism reigned. Many believed that the action of icebergs swept over land accounted for some of the features more effectively than the action of glaciers. In a few years, however, Agassizs theory of a great continental ice sheet prevailed because it explained so much about the erratics, polished rocks, gravels, and wide valleys that had been previously puzzling in the context of the deluge hypothesis. A scant two decades after his inaugural lecture, Buckland had completely repudiated diluvial catastrophism and had warmly embraced the concept of a great ice age. In Rupkes words, Buckland saw glaciation as the grand key to the diluvial phenomena. Many of his contemporaries eventually followed. [64] Footnotes: [63] The term Pleistocene epoch was used to refer to the time when the latest surficial deposits were deposited on top of older rocks. [64] For more detailed discussion of the first proposals concerning the effects of glaciation and an ice age, see Horace B. Woodward, The History of the Geological Society of London (London: Geological Society, 1907), p. 136-145; Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 96-106; and Nicolaas Rupke, The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology, 1814-1849 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 96-107. c.f., History of the Collapse of Flood Geology and a Young Earth, by Davis A. Young, PhD philvaz/apologetics/p82.htm
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