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I am not a geologist nor have I ever been terribly interested in geology until I began leading Tours. I soon learned how important the geology is and was to every place that people want to see and visit. I therefore felt compelled to learn more. But, in doing so, I became fascinated by what I was learning. As a result, I have a new found appreciation of what I am seeing and a distant relationship to those who are geologists. What good feelings they must have when the start to put the pieces history together with the beauty. I find Clarence Dutton to share his excitement and enjoyment a real treasure.
Clarence Edward Dutton was an American geologist and pioneer seismologist who developed and named the principle of isostasy. According to this principle, the level of the Earth’s crust is determined by its density; lighter material rises, forming continents, mountains, and plateaus, and heavier material sinks, forming basins and ocean floors. Dutton joined the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant in 1862. After the Civil War, he developed an interest in geology. In 1875 he joined the naturalist John Wesley Powell in the U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain region and spent 10 years exploring the plateaus of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. There he investigated volcanic action and the uplifting, sinking, twisting, and folding of the Earth’s crust. He was an energetic and effective field geologist: in 1875-1877 Dutton's field party mapped 12,000 square miles (31,000 km2) of the high plateaus of southern Utah, an area of rugged topography and poor access. Dutton had a distinctive flair for literary description, and is best remembered today for his colorful (and sometimes flamboyant) descriptions of the geology and scenery of the Grand Canyon region of Arizona. "Dutton first taught the world to look at that country and see it as it was... Dutton is almost as much the genius loci* of the Grand Canyon as Muir is of Yosemite" -- Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. Dutton’s study of the earthquake that affected Charleston, S.C., in 1886 led him to publish a report (1889) in which he advanced a method for determining the depth of the focal point of an earthquake and for measuring with unprecedented accuracy the velocity of waves. He proposed his principle of isostasy in the paper “On Some of the Greater Problems of Physical Geology” (1892). In 1904 he published the semipopular treatise Earthquakes in the Light of the New Seismology. Late in his career Dutton concluded that lava is liquefied by the heat released during decay of radioactive elements and that it is forced to the surface by the weight of overlying rocks.
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