It was numerous examples of matching fossils, geological formations, and deformations which played a key role in validating the theory of plate tectonics (originally "continental drift").
Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science, details this in her book Plate Tectonics: An insider's history of the modern theory of the Earth (2001), which is one of the most powerful narratives of how a hypothesis can go from wild-eyed fringe to the absolute foundation of an entire scientific discipline, one whose own origins date to the earliest recorded history, in only 50 years.
This focuses strongly on mid-Atlantic rift magnetic polarisation, which was key in confirming the drift theory, though it briefly mentions other evidence which helped prompt and support it earlier.
There was an article recently about how it was the discovery of dinosaur bones that really began the shift away from organized religion.
There had been theoretical arguments against religion before that made some headway - but this was a paradigm change. It was actually seeing dinosaur bones, and having to reconcile that with the idea of a 4,000 year old earth, that really changed hearts and minds. Suddenly the thought of being an atheist clicked with a lot more people. For the first time people credited the idea that Noah may have never had an ark. There was a distinct 'before' and 'after'.
Note: I'd love to annotate this with a link but unfortunately the results on this topic have been SEO-poisoned.
Catholic Church has no official teaching on the age of earth.
Atheism has always existed, it just may have been more or less visible depending on the political climate.
Even long ago when people worshiped ideas like Thagwag the rain god[0], there were probably non believers - are we so arrogant as to assume they didn’t exist?
“Hm we pray every day, sometime rain sometime not. Maybe no Thagwag?”
Lucretius wrote a natural history where the world and life is created through natural processes (like natural selection) rather than throug a deliberate act of design by gods. So the idea is older than Jesus and does not require dinosaur bones.
Dinosaur bones just shows that species can go extinct which does not contradict religion AFAIK. More important was the discovery of geological layers which showed the world was much older than suggested in the Bible.
Honestly I don’t think the rise of Atheism have that much to do with natural history anyway. The French revolution happened before Darwin. It is about questioning and overthrowing religious authority - you can do that without a theory of evolution. We still don’t know life started but this does not prevent people from becoming atheist.
Specifically it was the development of geology as a science, as the context in which to place dinosaur fossils.
Dinos by themselves were taken by many religious people to be the abominable creatures destroyed by the flood, which Noah was not able to save in his ark.
Geology is what discredited the 6000-year-old-Earth idea. Even before radioisotope dating, it was clear that there was sedimentary landscapes that would’ve taken tens or hundreds of millions of years to form. And then there was fossils of megafauna right in the middle of these rocks? That, plus Darwin’s alternative explanation for the origin of life, is what broke the creationist narrative.
Thinking about just how long the earth has been around fascinates me. I read (or listened to, rather) The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen, which was captivating. The audiobook is well-narrated too. We humans tend to think that the planet just "is" the way it is, but this is just how it exists in this moment in which we find ourselves observing it. The earth has worn many faces over the ages.
Earth has been around for so long that it's exhausted most of the Sun's life-supporting resource. We have barely a billion years to figure out where to go next before Sun overheats earth beyond any habitability; more realistically, just a few hundred million years. No time to waste.
And a few more billion to figure out where to go next after the heat death of the universe.
I think we have more urgent problems.
I very much doubt humanity will be around in a few million years time. We will have died out, or evolved significantly, or altered ourselves. In a billion years there will be nothing even remotely resembling us.
There are also some cool animations out there that show the drifting, smashing, and more drifting of the plates. I like ones like these that provide some modern landmarks, or showing it in reverse, so you can track individual places through it all:
Watching the Nasa sim, and others I've seen multiple times before, thought occurs that by re-liquifying much of the Earth after its initial formation, heavier elements which had otherwise been trapped in the crust / upper mantle might have re-mobilised and sunk deeper into the core.
I'm not sure of relative abundance of elements in the crusts of other rocky worlds, though at least generally Mars seems to have a greater prevalence of iron, and fewer of the lighter metals, in its own crust.
Arya Udry, Esteban Gazel, and Harry Y. McSween Jr., "Formation of Evolved Rocks at Gale Crater by Crystal Fractionation and Implications for Mars Crustal Composition", Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 123 (2018), Issue 6, pp. 1525-1540. <https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005602>
Harry Y. McSween Jr.1,G. Jeffrey Taylor, and Michael B. Wyatt, "Elemental Composition of the Martian Crust", Science 324 (2009), Issue 5928, pp. 736-739. <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/736>
(The fact that we now have geological studies of multiple specific regions of Mars delights me.)
I was so excited for a sec thinking that the matched the prints somehow to one individual dinosaur! It's not exactly news that the fossil record matches on either side of the Atlantic, though still cool
The story's potentially neat and interesting, but for how many times it's been republished in mearly identical
fashion across many mainstream outlets, there's doesn't seem to be a reference to a DOI or first-party source? I'm fine with having "matching" footprints have a different level of standard for geological time contexts, but give me something to read pls.
Of course the footprints look the same, the dinosaurs all used the same replicators to make their space boots before jet-packing over the proto-atlantic
Life is a mystery.
So much things to learn and discover that require unified efforts from all people around the world.
Yet, we prefer to kill each others instead.
Readit News
Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science, details this in her book Plate Tectonics: An insider's history of the modern theory of the Earth (2001), which is one of the most powerful narratives of how a hypothesis can go from wild-eyed fringe to the absolute foundation of an entire scientific discipline, one whose own origins date to the earliest recorded history, in only 50 years.
<https://archive.org/details/platetectonicsin0000unse>
Kirkus review: <https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-oreskes/pla...>
And a shorter more recent article-length treatment from Oreskes:
<https://www.nature.com/articles/501027a> (2013)
This focuses strongly on mid-Atlantic rift magnetic polarisation, which was key in confirming the drift theory, though it briefly mentions other evidence which helped prompt and support it earlier.
There had been theoretical arguments against religion before that made some headway - but this was a paradigm change. It was actually seeing dinosaur bones, and having to reconcile that with the idea of a 4,000 year old earth, that really changed hearts and minds. Suddenly the thought of being an atheist clicked with a lot more people. For the first time people credited the idea that Noah may have never had an ark. There was a distinct 'before' and 'after'.
Note: I'd love to annotate this with a link but unfortunately the results on this topic have been SEO-poisoned.
Atheism has always existed, it just may have been more or less visible depending on the political climate.
Even long ago when people worshiped ideas like Thagwag the rain god[0], there were probably non believers - are we so arrogant as to assume they didn’t exist?
“Hm we pray every day, sometime rain sometime not. Maybe no Thagwag?”
[0] made up
The Greeks had already gone through that shift in classical times, with no knowledge of dinosaurs.
Dinosaur bones just shows that species can go extinct which does not contradict religion AFAIK. More important was the discovery of geological layers which showed the world was much older than suggested in the Bible.
Honestly I don’t think the rise of Atheism have that much to do with natural history anyway. The French revolution happened before Darwin. It is about questioning and overthrowing religious authority - you can do that without a theory of evolution. We still don’t know life started but this does not prevent people from becoming atheist.
Dinos by themselves were taken by many religious people to be the abominable creatures destroyed by the flood, which Noah was not able to save in his ark.
Geology is what discredited the 6000-year-old-Earth idea. Even before radioisotope dating, it was clear that there was sedimentary landscapes that would’ve taken tens or hundreds of millions of years to form. And then there was fossils of megafauna right in the middle of these rocks? That, plus Darwin’s alternative explanation for the origin of life, is what broke the creationist narrative.
I think we have more urgent problems.
I very much doubt humanity will be around in a few million years time. We will have died out, or evolved significantly, or altered ourselves. In a billion years there will be nothing even remotely resembling us.
Deleted Comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6bWbDl2ItM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ng6YpxHxU
It doesn't even take ages for things to change.
It's unfortunate that the public idea of conservation has become so associated with stasis.
Follow the orange dot on each page of my book:
https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
(and if there was enough gas around for sound to carry, that too!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)
I guess this is close but not like the Hollywood blockbuster it should be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlhlCWplqk
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/collision-may-have-formed-...
I'm not sure of relative abundance of elements in the crusts of other rocky worlds, though at least generally Mars seems to have a greater prevalence of iron, and fewer of the lighter metals, in its own crust.
See: <https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/a/20711>
Citing:
Arya Udry, Esteban Gazel, and Harry Y. McSween Jr., "Formation of Evolved Rocks at Gale Crater by Crystal Fractionation and Implications for Mars Crustal Composition", Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 123 (2018), Issue 6, pp. 1525-1540. <https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005602>
Harry Y. McSween Jr.1,G. Jeffrey Taylor, and Michael B. Wyatt, "Elemental Composition of the Martian Crust", Science 324 (2009), Issue 5928, pp. 736-739. <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/736>
(The fact that we now have geological studies of multiple specific regions of Mars delights me.)
Dead Comment
I agree that online "click bait" science websites parrot the same content...google found the original paper though.