The Past is the Key to the Future

Abstract

As mentioned above the guiding principle in the author’s research was that “The Past is the Key to Forecasting the Future”. In many respects this reverses the direction, along the dimension of time, of the basic principle of the science of geology, according to which the author was educated. This corner-stone principle, laid down by the founders of the science of geology during the nineteenth century, stated that “The present is a key to the past”. This allowed learning from such present geological processes as the mechanisms and duration of erosion and deposition, to be applied to the time scale and processes of past geological eras.