Catastrophism

Catastrophism is the theory that Earth's geological features and the history of life have been shaped primarily by sudden, short-lived, violent events rather than by slow, gradual processes operating over long spans of time. The view was associated most closely with French naturalist Georges Cuvier in the early nineteenth century, who used the abrupt appearance and disappearance of fossil species in the geological record to argue for repeated catastrophic extinctions. Catastrophism was largely displaced in geology during the nineteenth century by uniformitarianism, but the discovery of the Chicxulub asteroid impact and its role in the end-Cretaceous extinction has since restored catastrophic events to a legitimate place within mainstream Earth science alongside gradual processes.