Within the profession

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Within the profession, the Survey had particular prestige. A geologist who sought field experience was likely to obtain it in such quantity and vaiiety nowhere else. Anita and Jack Epstein looked upon geology as “an extremely applied science” and shared a conviction that field experience was indispensable in any geological career-no less essential to a modem professor than it ever was flexplek huren rotterdam to a pick-and-shovel prospector. (“People should go out and get experience and not just tum around and teach what they’ve been taught.”) In their first year in the Survey-to an extent beyond anything they could ever have guessed-they would get what they sought. Because geology is sometimes intuitive even to the point of being subjective, the sort of field experience one happens to acquire may tend to influence one’s posture with regard to deep questions in the science. Geologists who grow up with young rocks are likely to subscribe strongly to the doctrine of uniformitarianism, whereby the present is seen to be the key to the past. They discern a river sandbar in a wall of young rock; they see a sandbar in a living river; and they know that each is in the process of becoming the other, cyclically through time. Whatever is also was, and ever again shall be. Geologists who grow up with very old rock tend to be flexplek huren almere impressed by the fact that it has been around since before the earliest development of life, and to imagine a progression in which the recycling of the earth’s materials is a subplot in a dramatic story that begins with dark scums in motion on an otherwise featureless globe and evolves through various continental configurations toward the scenery of the earth today. They refer to the earliest part of that story as “scum tectonics.” The rock cycle-with its crumbling mountains being carried to the sea to form there the rock of mountains to be -is the essence of the 1:1niformitarian principle, which was first articulated by James Hutton, of Edinburgh, at the end of the eighteenth century.