GENERAL GEOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -This is known as uniformitarianism: the idea that Earth has always changed in uniform ways and that the present is the key to the past. The principle of uniformitarianism is essential to understanding Earth’s history.

Detailed explanation-2: -In the first of three volumes, Charles Lyell sets forth the uniformitarian argument: processes now visibly acting in the natural world are essentially the same as those that have acted throughout the history of the Earth, and are sufficient to account for all geologic phenomena.

Detailed explanation-3: -uniformitarianism, in geology, the doctrine suggesting that Earth’s geologic processes acted in the same manner and with essentially the same intensity in the past as they do in the present and that such uniformity is sufficient to account for all geologic change.

Detailed explanation-4: -The two opposing schools of thought were known as “catastrophism” and “uniformitarianism". Catastrophism dates back as a scientific idea at least to Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth (1681), which speculated that the Earth had started out smooth and perfectly round.

Detailed explanation-5: -Coined by William Whewell, it was originally proposed in contrast to catastrophism by British naturalists in the late 18th century, starting with the work of the geologist James Hutton in his many books including Theory of the Earth.