What does a geologist see
when they see a beach. The thing that we
remember most as geologists is that time
is really, really deep. For me
'recent' means a couple million years ago.
Yesterday isn't even on my radar.
So when we think about beaches
The geologists' perspective is that beaches
as we see them today around the world
are only seven thousand years old.
They formed after the stabilization of
sea-level
after the last glacial maximum 13,000
years ago. So when we're looking at a
beach we're actually looking at
something that's
very recent, geologically yesterday, and
still in the process
of building and forming. Geologists use a
series of tools -- or actually laws --
that govern the way that we look at
environments. First is "uniformitarinism"
which is a wicked long word
that really simply means that the
present is the key to the past.
So if we look at a beach like this cliff here
and then we go back in the rock record,
the processes that made what we see today
are the same processes that operated 30
million years ago,
two billion years ago on our planet that
again
is 4.6 billion years old. So the first
thing --
uniformatarianism -- to understand
earth's history
you have to understand the processes
that happen on earth today.
