Geology element

The oldest geological disciplines in the modern sense - petrology, stratigraphy, paleontology - date from the 17th and 18th centuries. Others are much more recent and developed in the 19th and 20th centuries - seismology, geochemistry, geophysics, marine geosciences, oceanography, climatology, hydrology. Geology is a passion. Over the past sixty years, it has also become a profession. The geologists of the past set out to understand our globe through surface observations, and their work was remarkable, leading to an almost complete description of the Earth, especially the continents. But 1912 marked the beginning of a new era. Meteorologist and amateur geologist Alfred Wegener published his theory of continental drift.