bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The history of American theories of cave origin
Authors: Watson Richard A. , White William B. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
In 1930, William Morris Davis published “Origin of Limestone Caverns” in the GSA Bulletin, initiating an episode of mistaken interpretation and resistance to field evidence almost unique in American geology. Davis proposed a two-cycle, deep-circulation theory of cave genesis by phreatic solution. J Harlan Bretz made heroic efforts to defend the theory, but geologic facts show it to be mostly wrong.
Davis ignored European literature, particularly the work of Alfred Grand and Jovan Cvijić whose empirical studies demonstrate that many caves are formed by solutional and mechanical action near and above the water table. Davis was misled by his lack of geochemistry and by fanciful maps of Mammoth Cave that show a labyrinth rather than the actual modified dendritic pattern of passages.
Among others, Claude A. Malott and James H. Gardner presented theories that displaced Davis' phreatic theory. In particular, Allyn C. Swinnerton developed a theory of temperate zone cave formation by flow along a seasonally fluctuating water table that is best supported by geologic evidence today. Recent work by Franz-Dieter Miotke, Arthur N. Palmer, and others relates episodes of cave formation to Pleistocene glacial periods.
Geochemical work initiated by Clifford A. Kaye and others caused a revolution in cave studies, and these data integrated with geologic, geomorphic, and hydrologic details by Derek C. Ford, Ralph O. Ewers, and others have led to sophisticated models of cave origin adaptable to all situations.
Some caves are formed by deep phreatic solution, although Carol A. Hill argues that in Carlsbad Caverns the active agent was sulfuric, not carbonic acid. Davis' prestige was so great, however, that his incorrect hypothetical model was an obstacle to the understanding of cave origin, and remains so today because of its continued uncritical incorporation in some elementary texts.
Glacial geology and the North American craton
Authors: Totten Stanley M. , White George W. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
The craton was the focal point for the development of glacial geology in North America. Glacial deposits in the Ohio Valley were illustrated and described early in the century by Volney (1803, 1804), who, however, did not understand their origin and Drake (1815, 1825), who attributed the origin of erratics to icebergs. The iceberg hypothesis for the deposition of at least a part of the glacial drift persisted until late in the century.
The first glacial geologist in America was Charles Whittlesey who made early but significant studies in several states in the 1840s and 1850s. Whittelsey published the earliest maps and sections in America showing end moraines, kettle holes, and the glacial boundary. He was the first in America to classify drift, describe the “Forest Bed,” and trace drift in the subsurface.
In the 1860s and 1870s, the state geological surveys assumed a leadership role in glacial studies. Most notable of these was the Ohio Geological Survey directed by John Newberry, who was recognized as the leading glacial geologist of his time. An understanding of glacial lobes, glacial erosion of lake basins, moraines, multiple glaciation, and climatic change developed during this period.
In the 1880s, the U.S. Geological Survey under the guidance of T. C. Chamberlin established dominance in glacial studies of a regional nature. Chamberlin’s recognition that the glacial drift represented several glacial advances separated by warmer, nonglacial periods led to a formal classification for the North American Pleistocene.
By 1886, Chamberlin considered his phase of glacial studies essentially complete, and he assigned the responsibility of detailed moraine mapping to one of his assistants, Frank Leverett. Leverett proceeded to map in considerable detail the glacial drift and related geomorphic features of the Illinois and Erie lobes, covering an area extending from Iowa to New York. Leverett’s detailed mapping, keen observations, and ability to synthesize large volumes of data provided a fitting climax to nineteenth century glacial studies.
Development of ideas about the Canadian Shield
Authors: Wilson J. Tuzo 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
When the editors invited me to write they knew that I had begun field work on the Canadian Shield sixty years ago and had known many who had contributed to the great changes and developments in Precambrian geology. Unfortunately for the past seventeen years I have been fully engaged in administration and have not read the recent literature. This paper is thus a personal account and poorly documented. I’m not even sure which of the ideas advanced are accepted and which are still regarded as heretical.
In 1924, I started work in the woods, while still a schoolboy, and for much of the summers of 1926, 1927, and 1928 was field assistant to Noel E. Odell who had just returned from an expedition to Mount Everest on which he had been geologist and had made great efforts to find G. Mallory and A. Irvine, lost in their attempt to reach the summit. He was such an attractive teacher that on returning to the University of Toronto in 1927 I applied to transfer from a major in physics to one in geology. My professors were appalled. Physics was then in its heyday, but geology was held in very low esteem. Ernest Rutherford had compared it to postage-stamp collecting for it consisted of making maps by identifying and locating rocks and fossils. Instruments and methods were primitive and geology lacked general theories, which were scorned as “armchair geology.” This was in striking contrast to the precise theories common in physics, but few considered that Wegener’s concept of continents drifting slowly about had any merit, and no one, that I can recall, realized that therein lay the explanation for the lack of theories in geology.
Vestiges of a beginning
Authors: Cloud Preston 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
James Hutton’s proclamation that he saw “no vestige of a beginning” was an irresistible challenge. Geologists soon began searching downward through die “interminable greywackes” of Murchison for just such vestiges, especially of life. After Logan’s demonstration in the mid-1800s of thick sedimentary successions beneath fossiliferous Cambrian, Dawson described the generally discredited but perhaps in part biosedimentary Eozoon from rocks then thought to be among Canada’s most ancient. Stromatolites eventually became widely accepted as evidence of pre-Phanerozoic life. They are now recorded in carbonate rocks from perhaps 3.5 billion years (Gyr) ago onward. Many early reports also claimed the occurrence of Metazoa in rocks below the Cambrian. All reports turned out to be mistaken or dubious, however, except for those that now define the Ediacarian System which is basal to the Paleozoic Era and, in my view, a part of that era.
We see at last why searches for older Metazoa failed. The records of pre-Ediacarian life are paleomicrobiological, sedimentological, and biogeochemical. Microbial evidence is demonstrably present back to ~2 Gyr ago and still convincing back to ~ 2.8 Gyr ago. Stromatolites are presumptive evidence (not proof) for still older life. Geochemical interpretation is consistent with the presence of life back to the oldest known sediments. Metazoa began with the Ediacarian. They were the last main event of biological evolution. Thereafter, it involved primarily elaboration on the multicellular theme. The significant older records are cratonal, edited by the caprices of preservation, erosion, discovery, and subduction.
James Hall’s discovery of the craton
Authors: Dott Robert H. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
Preeminent nineteenth century American geologist James Hall was not only one of the most competent and ambitious paleontologists and stratigraphers of his day, he also had a firsthand early grasp of midwestern as well as Appalachian geology. In 1841 he joined David Dale Owen for a tour of the Ohio Valley to see how far west the New York State stratigraphie divisions could be extended. He was warmly rewarded. With similar motivation, he also joined the Foster-Whitney-Whittlesey Lake Superior Survey of 1850-51. Then, when the New York legislature terminated his salary during one of its feuds with the irascible paleontologist, Hall accepted an invitation to organize a survey for the young state of Iowa in 1855-59; and in 1856 he assumed an advisory role to the embryonic Wisconsin Survey. He also became a consultant for several other states and had helped to instigate the first Hayden-Meek western Survey to the South Dakota Badlands (1853).
Hall’s unique acquaintance with cratonic as well as Appalachian stratigraphy and structure equipped him to recognize the fundamental differences between cratons and orogenic belts. The great thickness and structurally complex nature of Appalachian Paleozoic strata then led to development of his famous theory of mountain building, which was first expounded in the 1857 AAAS presidential address soon after his princi-pal midwestern experiences. Although Hall’s inferred simplisitc causal relationship between sediment thickness and mountain building proved wrong, the observation that thick strata are somehow associated with active tectonism was of fundamental importance and is still very much
E. O. Ulrich’s impact on American stratigraphy
Authors: Merk George 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
The controversial concepts of Edward Oscar Ulrich (1857–1944) dominated American stratigraphy during the first decades of this century. His U.S.G.S. mapping experience and extensive knowledge of the paleontology and stratigraphy of North America culminated in his masterwork: Revision of the Paleozoic Systems (1911) and several late papers (1916, 1920, 1924). The revision, which served as a guide to a generation of geologists, also contains Ulrich’s philosophy of correlation.
Application of his geological concepts to American stratigraphie successions led Ulrich to propose radical changes in existing classifications and correlations. Among his more controversial proposals were the creation of two new lower Paleozoic time stratigraphie units of systemic rank, the Ozarkian and the Canadian; a theory of oscillating troughs and barriers to explain the occurrence of the shelly carbonate and graptolitic shale facies in adjacent strike belts in the Appalachians; and the revision of the Croixan Series of the Upper Mississippi Valley. Each of these proposals was incorporated in various textbooks and correlation charts of the period.
However, as detailed stratigraphie studies in the Ozarks, the Upper Mississippi Valley, and in the Appalachians were completed, it was found that Ulrich’s concept of correlation was untenable and it was gradually replaced by one stressing facies relations. But, because of his authority, his disputative nature, and the tenacity with which he held his views, the development of American stratigraphy had been hampered.
The Iowa landscapes of Orestes St John
Authors: Prior Jean C. , Milligan Carolyn F. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
Five original field sketches of the Iowa landscape, drawn in 1868 by Orestes H. St. John, were found in 1975 at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The pencil sketches were meticulously drawn, dated, and signed and included detailed landmark annotations. St. John, whose career paralleled significant developments within the field of geology, was Assistant Geologist of the Iowa Geological Survey from 1866 to 1869. Return of the sketches for the Survey archives revealed that these drawings correspond to five of the thirteen lithographs which illustrate the two-volume 1870 Report on the Geological Survey of the State of Iowa. The precise annotations enabled the authors to relocate and document the sites as they appear today. Revisiting these sites provided an opportunity to observe 110 years of historical change in land use from native prairie to intensive agriculture, urban growth, and woodland succession, as well as the effects of surface mining of mineral resources and the protection afforded to land in the public domain. Each site also had a significant geological context: the Missouri River valley and adjoining Loess Hills near Sioux City, the glacial moraines enclosing the Spirit Lake and West Okoboji Lake areas, the gypsum deposits near Fort Dodge, and the limestone resources exposed along the Des Moines River valley near Keosauqua. In relying on his own artistic skills to document these geological features and resources during this reconnaissance era of geological studies in Iowa, St. John joins the 19th Century tradition of documentary artists in America.
L. R. Wager and the geology of East Greenland
Authors: Brooks C. K. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
Wager is most well-known for his work on the Skaergaard Intrusion of East Greenland, which was a milestone in the history of igneous petrology. It laid the founda-tion for a much better understanding of magmatic processes and for a multitude of investigations on similar bodies in other parts of the world. Less well known are Wager’s achievements in mapping an extensive area of East Greenland in which spectacular examples of Tertiary intrusive and extrusive rocks occur. This achievement, which was a major contribution to the understanding of the geological history of the North Atlantic region, was only possible because of Wager’s outstanding abilities as a mountaineer, polar explorer and leader, as demonstrated on his Greenland expeditions of 1930-31,1932,1935-36 and 1953, as well as by his feats on Mount Everest in 1933.
Wager’s interests extended to a wide range of traditional earth sciences, including tectonics, geomorphology, sedimentology and metamorphic processes. In addition, he played an innovative role in the fields of geochemistry and radiometric dating. It was his appreciation of the importance of laboratory techniques and innovations that set his work apart from that of most other field geologists of his time, and this, combined with his thoroughness, gave him an important place in the history of geological science.
Wrong for the right reasons
Authors: Laporte Léo F. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
In the two decades preceding the establishment of plate tectonics theory, G. G. Simpson wrote a series of papers that refuted the paleobiogeographic evidence purportedly requiring direct continental connections. So cogent was his rebuttal that drift proponents thereafter downplayed the past distribution of fossils.
Simpson presented several different arguments. He restricted his discussion to Cenozoic mammals with whose evolutionary history he was most familiar; he challenged the accuracy of the proponents舗 data; he criticized their methodology, both with respect to its undue appeal to authority and its lack of parsimony; he used his own “coefficient of faunal similarity” to show that present-day mammal distributions on dispersed continents are comparable to those for Tertiary continents; and perhaps most effective was his statistical argument that trans-oceanic dispersal of organisms, while highly improbable for a single event, is practically certain given the many opportunities for such events over geologic time spans. Simpson舗s objections arose from his own independently developed theory of historical biogeography which, by relying on mobile organisms dispersing across stable continents, was fully adequate to explain the paleobiogeographic data. Simpson thus regarded both drift theory and trans-oceanic land-bridges neither sufficient nor necessary to account for those data.
Notes of a packer in the Idaho-Montana line survey summer of 1899
Authors: Brattain Ross R. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
After I had finished my second year at Whitman (Whitman State College), Wink Worthington and I rode our bicycles to Spokane. It seems that Leslie (Leslie Brattain, Ross Brattain’s brother) was still reading law with Blake & Post or had gone into some office to get experience. Anyway he had living rooms and Wink and I stayed there while looking for a job. Wink read in the paper that there were some U.S.G.S. men at the Hotel Spokane who wanted to hire some young men to work for the summer on an Idaho-Montana line survey. College men who had some knowledge of such work preferred. He went to see them and took me. He had worked with his brother surveying and I had worked on a job of subdividing a township and also I had experience as a packer. We were both hired. The engineer in charge was a Mr. Rayburn and the head man to start us off was a Mr. Gannett. (Henry Gannett, illustrious geographer and topographic engineer). We were given tickets and told to report at Heron, Montana, which was the closest railroad point to our point of departure. All we had to take with us were clothes to wear on the job, everything else was furnished by the U.S.G.S. We reported as directed and found Mr. Rayburn and Mr. Gannett there and a packer by the name of McQuirck and with him ten pack mules with Mexican aparejos and two saddle horses with men’s saddles, one of which was white and the bell mare of the pack train.
Contributions of the state geological surveys
Authors: Oakeshott Gordon B. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
At the opening of the nineteenth century, almost none of the sciences were taught in educational institutions. A point of great importance to the early development of geology was the appointment of Benjamin Silliman as professor of chemistry and natural science at Yale College in 1802. Silliman’s students initiated a number of state geological surveys in the 1820s and 1830s, starting with North Carolina in 1823, which made major contributions to geological understanding, principles, and applications. There are now 51 state geological surveys—including Puerto Rico—each with staffs ranging from a single “State Geologist” to over 200 people. Of the original state surveys only the California survey, founded in 1880, has survived to the present day with continuous funding. Alabama, Alaska, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas maintain their positions as the largest of the state surveys. The U.S. Geological Survey, which does work in all states and in foreign territory, was founded in 1879.
From their beginnings, through the 1950s, state activities were strongly oriented to mineral-resources studies, geologic mapping, and public information. The 1960s saw the burgeoning of concerns for the “environmental” (and engineering) applications of geology.
The decade of the 1970s witnessed greatly-increased emphasis on engineering and environmental geology, especially investigations of “geologic hazards”; development of mineral resources, with due regard to the disposal of wastes, and other environmental concerns; and a renewed consciousness of the importance of public and political participation. Budgets and personnel of the state surveys approximately doubled during the decade. This trend has continued into the '80s, but, lately, growth has been somewhat inhibited by budget restrictions and inflation.
The state geological surveys are economically and politically responsive to state authority and therefore have developed a unique capability to serve directly the geological needs of the public.
A history of geology at the University of Pennsylvania
Authors: Faul Carol 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
A survey of the study of geology and geologists at the University of Pennsylvania up to the end of the nineteenth century provides a kaleidoscope of the development of American geology. The topics emphasized and the work of Penn faculty elsewhere show the evolution of state and national surveys and organizations.
Geology at the University of Pennsylvania began in 1749 when Benjamin Franklin aided in establishing a formal academy of study. At first, geology was taught peripherally to other fields, mainly by botanists, chemists, and physicians. There was discussion about a professorship of geology and mineralogy in 1816 but the subject was diffused among other professorships. In 1835 geology was formally established at the University of Pennsylvania and Henry Darwin Rogers was appointed Professor of Geology and Mineralogy.
A succession of geologist-administrators dominated Penn geology through much of the nineteenth century; among them, Alexander D. Bache, who left Penn to head the U.S. Coast Survey in 1843; Henry Darwin Rogers, director of the New Jersey Geological Survey and the First Geological Survey of Pennsylvania while a Penn professor; Ferdinand V. Hayden, director of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories; and J. Peter Lesley, director of the Second Geological Survey of Pennsylvania. Joseph Leidy and Edward D. Cope were renowned vertebrate paleontologists who worked on Hayden’s Survey material.
Beginning around the turn of the century, students succeeded their teachers as heads of the Department and geology declined, with intermittent, unsuccessful attempts to revive it, until 1963, when the present reconstruction began. It is a task which Henry Faul, one of its architects, estimated would take 25 years to complete.
The early development of archaeological geology in North America
Authors: Gifford John A. , Rapp George 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
As in Europe, in North America the origins of archaeological geology stemmed from discoveries of artifacts and fossil mammal bones together, and the bearing of such associations on the antiquity of humans in the New World. After 1870 the expansion of American and Canadian federal government surveys into the western portions of North America fostered a tradition of geologists undertaking archaeological field studies as a contingent part of their primary work. This informal collaboration ended around the turn of the century (with a few notable exceptions), as both sciences crystallized into more strictly defined fields. Debate over the antiquity of humans in the New World continued into the 1920s, only ending when definitive geological and paleontological evidence was presented to date artifacts to the end of the last glaciation.
While the initial link between archaeology and geology in North America concerned the question of human entry, other fields of research during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century included petrography of stone artifacts as a means of determining their origin, and geomorphic studies of archaeological sites as an indication of landform modification and environmental change. From such “informal” interdisciplinary research, often accomplished by individual initiative, the connection between geology and archaeology grew, slowly in the pre-World-War-II period and almost explosively in postwar decades due to a general realization by archaeologists of the natural environment’s importance in understanding cultural development.
Application as stimulus in geology
Authors: Jordan William M. 
Published: April 2015

Abstract
The Geological Society of America was conceived in 1881 and bom in 1888 as part of an era of unprecedented mineral-based prosperity that has continued, with wartime and business cycle fluctuations, to the present. From its earliest days, geology and its practical applications, particularly industrial, have been intimately connected. This paper examines the mutual relationship of practical need and geology during the first halfcentury of the GSA, focusing particularly on how practical needs stimulated theoretical developments. Three specific examples of this relationship are given: G. K. Gilbert’s studies of hydraulic mining-induced aggradation of streams in California; the influence of iron and other mining in the Lake Superior region on the early development of Precambrian stratigraphy; and geology’s rediscovery of the concept of facies as a consequence of exploration for coal in Utah and the search for petroleum in the Permian of West Texas.