Among religious tales, none is as easy to disprove as the so called “Great Flood”. That the flood is a figment of human imagination has been known to geologists for over 300 years. What is more, the knowledge that has laid these fictitious characters and events to waste has been absolutely critical to human progress.

The story starts with a 17th century pioneer named Robert Hooke.

He dabbled brilliantly in many things, but one subject of particular interest was the origin of these curious fossils that people kept digging up, which were thought to be either creatures turned to stone by some miraculous process, or were the expression of an intrinsic nature of stone to mimic life. Hooke examined the details of fossils microscopically, and determined that they had once been alive, and also worked out how the transformation had occurred — by the perfusion of minerals into buried or immersed dead organisms. He also examined the distribution of fossils; finding fossilized clams on mountaintops, for instance, says something about the prior state of that environment.

And then there’s Baron Cuvier (1769-1832) and Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847) who studied the rocks of the Paris Basin. There were many quarries situated around Paris that cut deep into the hills to provide building stone, and they gave these two the opportunity to look into the structure of the rocks. They identified five major layers, and by examining the fossils, worked out what kinds of animals and plants lived there when the layers were deposited. They found that layers with saltwater species were interleaved with layers containing freshwater species — Paris had been under the sea at least twice!

At the same time Cuvier and Brongniart were exploring the Paris Basin, William Smith (1769-1839) was walking all over England, building up his geological map. We know what his motivation was: it was economic. He worked in mines, and was eager to capitalize on the opportunities opened up by the Industrial Revolution. Railroad and canal cuts exposed the strata of English geology all over the place, and being able to assess good locations for coal mines was a profitable skill — much like petroleum geology now. Smith observed consistent features of geology, like the way rocks were layered, and what fossils were present in specific layers, and could see that a layer was a slice of time, and that each slice contained different animals (which led to his Principle of Faunal Succession). He worked out the first geological map of Britain on the basis of his surveying.

There is a pattern to geology: we can see that the strata are not purely local phenomena, but part of formations that often extend continent-wide. These strata also have a predictable order that reflects the timing of their formation.

It turns out, the men paved the ground for our understanding of geology and evolution, hence, by necessity, setting aside old myths like the Great Flood, were not trying to undercut the Bible. Their motive, aside from curiosity, was very similar to prospectors of today: to trace the Earth’s inner riches.

Which brings us to how we know the Great Flood never happened. Flood Geology simply found no place in the writings of James Hutton, who put together the knowledge of his day in a comprehensive tome.

He postulated that the geology we see was created by multiple cycles of sedimentary deposition, volcanic uplift, and erosion, and he mapped and documented complex unconformities and intrusions that demonstrated that the history of the earth was complex and required great time for the formation and distortion of rock. He also found that the evidence of the time was insufficient to even show the history of the beginning of the earth, which is why he closed his book, Theory of the Earth, with the famous line, “The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”

Of course today we know the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, beyond the wildest imagination of 18th century scientists. But if you fast forward to 21st century, you’ll find the fingerprints of those early pioneers all over the place, as cutting edge technology paves the way for mining minerals in an insurgency-ridden Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON, July 30, 2012 – Officials from the Defense Department and the U.S. Geological Survey gathered this month at Afghanistan’s U.S. Embassy to unveil what the director of a DOD task force called a “treasure map” of the nation’s mineral resources.

At the event, James Bullion of the Defense Department’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, or TFBSO, shared the podium with USGS Director Marcia McNutt, who described a new remote-sensing technology that has made it possible, for the first time, she said, to map more than 70 percent of the country’s surface and identify potential high-value deposits of copper, gold, iron, and other minerals.

DOD officials and USGS scientists work as partners in this initiative with the Afghanistan government and scientists and engineers from the Afghan Ministry of Mines and the Afghan Geological Survey.

From August to October 2007, NASA contributed its mid-wing, long-range WB-57 aircraft to fly the USGS hyperspectral instrument over Afghanistan, mapping more than 70 percent of the country. In 2009, USGS and the DOD task force became partners and worked closely, Bullion said, to help to get the hyperspectral data into a format that mining companies could use to evaluate opportunities in the mineral sector.

“Hyperspectral data uses the reflectance of light and uses the fact that different minerals reflect light in different wavelength bands,” McNutt explained. “Every mineral has its own signature or fingerprint.”

Hyperspectral imaging characterizes minerals only on the surface of the Earth, not underground where the minerals are mined. The technology wouldn’t work well in countries where forests, grasses and soil cover the ground, but it’s perfect for Afghanistan. Over 50 million years, the slow-motion collision of Iran and Eurasian tectonic plates beneath Afghanistan formed rugged, rocky mountains out of what used to be mineral-laden subsurface rock.

The hyperspectral instrument “can be used in a place where there’s no vegetative cover, and Afghanistan happens to have almost no vegetation and it is resource-laden,” McNutt explained. “And because of plate tectonic properties… it has been tectonically uplifted and tectonically unroofed to reveal at the surface the mother lode of resources.”

When compared with conventional ground mapping, McNutt added, hyperspectral technology has accelerated by decades the ability to identify the most promising areas for Afghan economic development.

In December, supported by the DOD task force, officials from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines opened tender processes, or auctions, for exploration and later exploitation of four project areas in the country.

The Badakhshan gold project is in Badakhshan province, the Zarkashan copper and gold project is in Ghazni province, the Balkhab copper project spans Sar-I-Pul and Balkh provinces, and the Shaida copper project is in Herat province.

As it turns out, though, it is not just the mining industry that relies heavily on modern geology-so is our understanding of biological evolution.

Charles Lyell was also an important geologist, who was also very influential on Charles Darwin. He was not an atheist, but rather, a devout Christian, which caused him considerable discomfort since he was never able to accept the full implications of Darwin’s work. Lyell’s key dictum was that the present is the key to the past, that what you needed to do was work out mechanisms in action right now and use those to explain what must have happened in the past.

Darwin’s antecedents had already laid the foundations in working out that the earth was old, that life had undergone many transitions, and that maybe species were mutable. Evolution was an inevitable conclusion of the evidence; Darwin and Wallace were just the clever fellows who managed to pull the whole story together.

But of course, no amount of evidence will ever convince literalists that their scriptures are ridden with fantasies, even as they hypocritically take advantage of the same technology that wouldn’t exist without getting rid of those fallacies.