I also recalled how Alvarez’ work on the Chixclub meteor (the one that explained the K-T boundary and the extinction of the dinosaurs) was once resisted, even dismissed contemptuously, as a “return to Catastrophism”. For centuries, many geological features where explained as evidence of past “Catastrophes”, that is, sudden events like the Great Flood of Genesis. Eventually, geologists convinced themselves that most of the earth’s geomorphology was the result of long-term processes that were still underway, not dramatic, one-time interruptions in earth history. Suddenly, Catastrophism went from orthodoxy to superstition. Still, it should have been clear that even if Gradualism explained the earth’s features, this certainly didn’t necessarily rule out the occasional catastrophe. As always, the truth is somewhere in between, even if it tends to cluster more on one side of the continuum than the other. Whether or not the Cretaceous extinction was solely the result of an asteroid strike is certainly a valid question, but a simple look at the Moon’s uneroded surface should certainly establish that a bombardment certainly took place in the distant past.

When geologists and biologists finally began to convince themselves that the fossil record must have been millions of years in the
making, astronomers still resisted the concept of Deep Time. One calculated that even if the sun’s entire mass was pure coal burning in a continuously replenished oxygen atmosphere, there was only enough fuel there to support a mere ten thousand years of combustion. The solar system simply couldn’t be much older than that! This was before the discovery of the vast storehouse of energy locked up in the atomic nucleus–radioactivity had yet to be discovered. Still one astronomer did muse that perhaps at temperatures of millions of degrees, perhaps energy flowed from matter “like steam from boiling water”.

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