Uniformitarianism

[9] Coined by William Whewell, uniformitarianism was originally proposed in contrast to catastrophism[10] by British naturalists in the late 18th century, starting with the work of the geologist James Hutton in his many books including Theory of the Earth.

[12] Today, Earth's history is considered to have been a slow, gradual process, punctuated by occasional natural catastrophic events.

Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) proposed Neptunism, where strata represented deposits from shrinking seas precipitated onto primordial rocks such as granite.

In 1785 James Hutton proposed an opposing, self-maintaining infinite cycle based on natural history and not on the Biblical account.

Hence we find a reason to conclude: Hence we are led to conclude, that the greater part of our land, if not the whole had been produced by operations natural to this globe; but that in order to make this land a permanent body, resisting the operations of the waters, two things had been required; Hutton then sought evidence to support his idea that there must have been repeated cycles, each involving deposition on the seabed, uplift with tilting and erosion, and then moving undersea again for further layers to be deposited.

At Glen Tilt in the Cairngorm mountains he found granite penetrating metamorphic schists, in a way which indicated to him that the presumed primordial rock had been molten after the strata had formed.

[18] In the spring of 1788 he took a boat trip along the Berwickshire coast with John Playfair and the geologist Sir James Hall, and found a dramatic unconformity showing the same sequence at Siccar Point.

[19] Playfair later recalled that "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time",[20] and Hutton concluded a 1788 paper he presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, later rewritten as a book, with the phrase "we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end".

Georges Cuvier's paleontological work in the 1790s, which established the reality of extinction, explained this by local catastrophes, after which other fixed species repopulated the affected areas.

He drew his explanations from field studies conducted directly before he went to work on the founding geology text,[23] and developed Hutton's idea that the earth was shaped entirely by slow-moving forces still in operation today, acting over a very long period of time.

The terms uniformitarianism for this idea, and catastrophism for the opposing viewpoint, was coined by William Whewell in a review of Lyell's book.

Geoscientists support diverse systems of Earth history, the nature of which rests on a certain mixture of views about the process, control, rate, and state which are preferred.

Because geologists and geomorphologists tend to adopt opposite views over process, rate, and state in the inorganic world, there are eight different systems of beliefs in the development of the terrestrial sphere.