Building on the thread below…

Geologists seem to have an aversion, if not a downright revulsion to catastrophism. I can see why, for far too long geological events and formations were explained as the Hand of God or The Great Flood. It is clear today that the Earth evolves slowly, and its features are mostly the result of processes which are currently underway now, just as they were in the past and will continue into the future. These processes are violent and dramatic, but they are extremely slow on a human scale.

Still, sometimes things happen suddenly, and this reluctance to admit that seems to have made it difficult for any short-term explanation or theory to escape ridicule from the geological establishment; witness the knee-jerk resistance to the Cretaceous meteor strike. Did the Mediterranean and the Black Sea really fill up over a matter of a few weeks or months? Do great tsunamis occasionally sweep giant waves hundreds of miles inland?