Dennis R. Dean

Graham Island, Charles Lyell, and the Craters of Elevation Controversy

C HARLES LYELL paid the first of several visits to Mount Etna, whose Val del Bove had been especially recommended to him for study, in December 1828.1 Lyell was then at the beginning of his career. His investigation helped convince him of the error of the currently popular craters of elevation theory, which held that volcanoes are formed by the cataclysmic upheaval of underlying rock strata. He did not hesitate to attack the elevationist position in the first volume (1830) of his Principles of Geology, which advocated the alternative and more traditional view that volcanic cones are created by the accumulation of ejecta around the vent. Before his subsequent volumes appeared there arose in the Mediterranean a new volcano, eventually named Graham Island.2 As disputants from both sides seized upon this welcome opportunity to intensify the debate over the elevation theory, Lyell looked eagerly to the new island for evidence that eruption was the primary force at work in building volcanoes. Graham Island and this controversy over the formation of volcanic cones were both discussed in every edition of Lyells major work; both were also relevant to more basic disagreements between Lyell and his opponents over the origin of mountain ranges and the nature of geological forces. Although Graham Island did not settle any of these controversies, its implications stimulated Lyell and other members of the geological community for years. In this essay I reconstruct the history of Graham Island and trace Lyells career-long involvement with it, while summarizing the major theoretical disputes that the appearance of the island exacerbated and that Lyell attempted with considerable success to resolve.