Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet by Ted Nield Page A

uses up its hydrogen fuel. And despite the delaying tactics of radioactivity, the Earth is indeed very gradually cooling down. Changes like this are one-way-only.
    Cycles, however, were the essence of uniformitarianism as presented by Lyell. They allowed nature to repeat herself endlessly to the last syllable of time. What attracted Lyell to cases like the Graham Bank volcano and the ups and downs of the Bay of Naples was that they allowed him to make a subtly different point, namely that even if the rocks do speak of catastrophe, gradualism still dominates time.
    The Vesuvius eruption of AD 79 left a lot of geological evidence behind. Catastrophes often give rise to more evidence than the uneventful ages that pass between them. But this does not mean that the past was more violent than today; it just means that the rocks are unrepresentative. Like a scandal sheet called the Geological Record, rocks scurrilously report everything lurid and gruesome but leave out the everyday stuff. Lyell’s Earth was cyclic, placid even, and there was no progression, wave following on wave.
    Suess wasn’t having this. His was a uniformitarianism for revolutionaries . For Suess there was more to existence than endless repetition. Not everything that goes around comes around. What happens today can make a difference, for ever. Suess rejected the idea that processes going on around us now are the only yardstick against which to measure the Earth’s massive history.
    In reconstructing supercontinents even older than Gondwanaland , lands that existed when the Earth was very different, Earth scientists today are able to envision much stranger things than Lyell’s philosophy would ever allow them to dream of, and yet still keep their scientific heads. Suess, who also peered deeply into time, lacked the true Englishman’s fondness for the status quo. This man, who had stood on mountains and barricades, built aqueducts, tamed rivers and discovered a supercontinent, understood something Lyell did not: things need not always have been the way they are.

Endeth the world … (not)
     
    In mid-1960, engineers were carving out the Mont Blanc tunnel, which connects France and Italy, through the roots of the tallest Alpine massif. But on 14 July a small band gathered nearby to witness the End of the World, which was supposed to take place at 1.45pm. As the moment approached, women began wailing. A bugler in lederhosen stood up and delivered an impression of the final trump.
    Then, unexpectedly, 2.46 arrived.
    The cult leader, Elio Bianca, who before becoming a prophet had worked as a paediatrician with the Milan Electric Company, said afterwards: ‘We made a mistake.’ The next day the New York Times ran a story under the headline ‘ WORLD FAILS TO END ’. You could hardly ask for a more succinct statement of strict Lyellian uniformitarianism.
    By contrast, the first people to climb Mont Blanc did so at the behest of a geologist, who was more anxious to know about how the Earth began. Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99) put up two guineas for the first person to find a route to the top of ‘ la montagne maudite ’ (‘the accursed mountain’) after visiting Chamonix for the first time in 1760. It was twenty-five years before anyone made a claim, but in the end it was chamois hunter and crystal gatherer Jacques Balmat, together with a local physician, Michel-Gabriel Paccard, who became the first humans to stand at the summit, on 8 August 1786.
    De Saussure himself gained the summit himself a year later and verified its height as 4785 metres (twenty-five metres short, but enough to put it in the record books). And although he later gave up trying to disentangle the fearsome structural complexity of the Alps, de Saussure summed up a whole tradition of European geology when he wrote: ‘It is the study of mountains which above all else can quicken the progress of the theory of the Earth.’ Understandingmountains and the processes that build