Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
Granite Wars: The Debates That Built a Science
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Mike Ackerson (Smithsonian) for the kick-off of a deep-dive series on granites and granitoids. This one goes into the weeds: the 250-year history of how arguing about granite shaped nearly every major idea in the geosciences.
We trace the great controversies from the 1700s to today:
🌊 Neptunism vs. Plutonism — Did granite precipitate out of a global ocean, or crystallize from molten rock? How James Hutton's fingers of granite at Glen Tilt helped kill the Neptunist worldview.
⏳ Uniformitarianism & deep time — How Charles Lyell's expansion of geologic time…
The skinny
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