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e13d27e
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The scientific world of the time was in the midst of a terrible ferment, with discoveries and realizations coming at an unseemly rate. To many in the ranks of the conservative and the devout, the new theories of geology and biology were delivering a series of hammer blows to mankind's self-regard. Geologists in particular seemed to have gone berserk, to have thrown off all sense of proper obeisance to their Maker... Mankind, it seemed, was now suddenly rather - dare one say it? - insignificant. He may not have been, as he had eternally supposed, specially created.
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science
god
volcano
volcanism
geography
geology
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Simon Winchester |
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1d9ebc2
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Sophisticated human beings were on hand to see this volcano's convulsions, they were able to investigate the event, and they were able to attempt to understand the processes that had caused such dreadful violence...their observations, painstaking and precise as science demanded, collided head-on with a most discomfiting reality: that while in 1883 the world was becoming ever more scientifically advanced, it was in part because of these same advances that its people found themselves in a strangely febrile and delicately balanced condition...
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indonesia
volcanism
tsunami
geology
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Simon Winchester |
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6b3bf58
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We know that relatively minor sea-level rises could set off major ice-sheet breakups, and it has been suggested by Stephen Oppenheimer that the tremendous earthquakes caused by isostatic rebalancing at the end of the Ice Age could have stirred up 'mountain-topping superwaves' in the northern regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Other than Oppenheimer's own investigations, however, my impression is that while many brilliant individual scientists have studied individual post-glacial phenomena in great depth, very little has yet been done to investigate all these phenomena together as part of a complex system or to consider the effects on the earth and its human population of multiple, interacting cataclysms -- floods, lands subsiding into the sea, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions -- all occurring at the same time.
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earthquakes
ice-sheets
superwaves
volcanism
deep-human-history
sea-level-rises
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Graham Hancock |