Catastrophism is the idea that
Earth has been affected by sudden, short-lived, violent events that were sometimes worldwide in scope.
The dominant paradigm of geology has been uniformitarianism (also sometimes described as gradualism), but recently a more inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed resulting in a gradual change in the scientific consensus, reflecting acceptance of some catastrophic events.
Before uniformitarianism, the dominant belief in many cultures of the creation and development of the world was essentially catastrophism. While the biblical account of the Great Flood is a prime example of these beliefs, it is also "stated in scientific method with surprising frequency among the Greeks", an example being Plutarch's account in his chapter on Solon.[1] Earth's history was viewed as the result of an accumulation of catastrophic events over a relatively short time period. It was basically the only way to rationalize the observations of early geologists with a believed short history of Earth before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The leading scientific proponent of catastrophism in the early 19th century was the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. His motivation was to explain the patterns of extinction and faunal succession that he and others were observing in the fossil record. While he did speculate that the catastrophe responsible for the most recent extinctions in Eurasia might have been the result of the inundation of low lying areas by the sea, he never made any reference to the Noachian flood.[2] Nor did he ever make any reference to divine creation as the mechanism by which repopulation occurred following the extinction event. In fact Cuvier, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the intellectual climate of the French revolution, avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.[3] Cuvier also believed that the stratigraphic record indicated that there had been several of these revolutions, which he viewed as recurring natural events, amid long intervals of stability during the history of life on earth. This led him to believe the Earth was several million years old.[4]
