Introduction

Abstract

Earth is a terrestrial planet whose history is recorded in rocks (Fig. 1.1). Like fingerprints left at a crime scene, the evidence for past landscape-forming events is strewn about Earth’s surface – hidden in canyons, on mountains, and beneath lakes and seas. This history hasn’t always been recognized and only when Renaissance-era scientists began to use newly acquired tools and their newly acquired knowledge about natural Earth processes did they begin to seek out evidence, first for a Biblical flood, then for events on a much grander scale. Although no evidence for such a flood was found, the idea that Earth’s rocks contained evidence for its ancient past grew in the minds of these early scientists, setting them on a path that led to the development of the science of geology.