Viewing and learning about the
geological structures of our planet is appealing to almost everyone.
Indeed, many national parks and natural monuments, visited by millions
of people every year, preserve and display dramatic structures exposed
at the earth’s surface. Who is not intrigued by the vastness
of geologic time when peering down into the Grand Canyon, or dumbfounded
by the power of mountain-building processes when first confronting
the Rocky Mountains rising out of the great plains of the central
United States?
Mapping,
describing and analyzing geologic structures help us to understand
and to appreciate the wonders of the natural world. One of the great
scientists of the early twentieth century, Henri Poincaré,
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The scientist does not study nature because it is
useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and
he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not
beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth
living, ... . It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful
that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take
delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing
with a microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness,
and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of the past that
attracts us because of its remoteness (quoted in Chandrasekhar, 1979).
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