Geology, Evolution and Santorini

A room with a view…

I am spending this week in Oia in Santorini, with a lovely view of the caldera.

Santorini is a Greek Island, but one with a unique history.

It was once the top of a volcano which blew up around 1645 BCE, destroying not only the island, but most of ancient Minoan civilization.  Scientists estimate that the explosion set off a Mediterranean tsunami that created a tidal wave 850 feet high traveling at several hundred miles an hour.

What remained of the island was a crater, into which the sea rushed. This is the caldera, a kind of inland sea, upon which I am looking now.

Etched in the cliffsides of the caldera, which go up many hundreds of feet, are strata after strata of rock, each a different color.

For anyone who has visited the Grand Canyon, this is a fairly familiar site, but for William Smith, such a site was life and world changing.

Smith is the little known Father of Geology.  What Darwin was to evolution, Smith was to Geology, and indeed all our understanding of our geological history.  Darwin would not have been possible were it not for Smith.

Smith was born to simple circumstances in 1769 and spent some of his years in a debtors prison. He was hardly a trained scientist of any sort.

But England in the late 18th Century was undergoing a technological revolution.  Coal was rapidly replacing wood as the primary source of energy, and England was was (and is) to coal as Saudi Arabia is to oil. The Island sits atop a massive mountain of the stuff.

Of course, in the 1760s, no one even knew where (or how for that matter) to dig for coal.  It seemed to appear at the surface in seams almost by accident.  

Smith began mapping where coal had already been found in Wales and Northern England and began to see a pattern.  Coal, it appeared, occurred in seams that continued both horizontally and vertically. If you could map where coal had already been found, you could quite accurately predict where it would be found next.

This discovery turned out to be worth a fortune, both to the burgeoning coal industry and to Smith.  

But he was not content to leave it alone there. He set out to create the first complete geological map of England; something no one had ever done before, in England or anywhere else.

In creating him map, Smith was able to visit all of England, and along the coasts, well cut by the sea and a bit like the Caldera here in Santorini, Smith noticed the long layers of rock, one type piled upon the others. Sometimes they ran in seams. Sometimes the whole thing would be folded or even turned upside-down.

Smith became aware that something dynamic was happening.

Before Smith, most of the world accepted the common wisdom that the earth was about 6,000 years old. This dating came from the bible, and there was no reason to suspect otherwise.

Smith began to find sea beds high in the mountains of Scotland.  Fossilized shellfish far from the sea, and buried in strata of rock.  Prior to Smith, most scientists ascribed these sea beds to remnants from the flood of Noah.  Smith could see, and began to prove otherwise.

Smith’s ideas were shockingly radical.  He postulated that instead of being 6,000 years old, the earth was more likely millions of years old… (even that was an under-estimate), but so heretical as to be unthinkable and largely unacceptable.

Sitting here in Santorini, looking at the walls of the Caldera, we can see what Smith saw on the English coast.  

But this view in Santorini has been here for more than 3,000 years.  Thousands and thousands of people have looked up it. Yet not one of them saw what Smith was able to see.  

It was not that he was exposed to something so unusual. He was exposed to what everyone else had been exposed to. Yet Smith was able to see in that commonality something that no one had ever seen before.

Was it genius? Or just perseverance?

Smith ultimately changed the way we saw ourselves and our world, and everyone (except for a few troglodytes in Kentucky and Texas) now accept what was once so unthinkable; that the earth is in fact 4.5 billion years old.

That knowledge is recent history on this planet.

Was  Smith able to see the world in a slightly different way because he in fact was not a trained scientist?

Is being an outsider a benefit?

There is a wonderful book about Smith entitled The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology.

Read it.