Catastrophism In 1908 over Tunguska, Russia, an object that is believed to have been either a comet or a stony meteorite exploded with the force of a nuclear bomb. If it had happened over an urban area instead of over Siberian wilderness, the loss of...

In the late seventeenth century, Anglican Archbishop James Ussher developed a biblical chronology that established the date of the Earth's creation at 9 a.m., October 26, 4004 b.c. His calculations were taken seriously for 200 years and promoted...

Ever since the work of George Cuvier in the late 1700's, the evolutonary mechanisms driving speciation have been debated by both scientists and the general public. Cuvier was a French naturalist who demonstrated the reality of extinctions of species...

Catastrophism is the idea that Earth has been affected by sudden, short-lived, violent events that were sometimes worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of geology has been uniformitarianism (also sometimes described as gradualism), but recently a...

Skittish from Hurricane Katrina and bracing for another storm season, lawmakers including Florida Gov. Charlie Crist asked Wednesday for a national catastrophe fund to help hold down property insurance premiums.The Bush administration rejected the idea, however, and a leading Democrat promised only to create a...

A government insurance backstop for floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters would be created under a proposal promoted Thursday by lawmakers. They said rising insurance rates are forcing many people to go without homeowners' coverage.The legislation would establish a national catastrophe fund for property insurance...