Uniformitarianism

Uniformitarianism is a big word that means the same processes that shape the Earth today have been happening for a very long time. So, if we see a river carving a canyon today, we know that might have happened millions of years ago too, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth!

It's like a recipe: if we see someone baking cookies today, we can be pretty sure they were baked the same way in the past. That's what scientists call uniformitarianism, and it means that we can use what we know about the present to figure out how things happened in the past.

So, let's say we find some rocks that have been carved by a river, but we don't see any river around. We can use what we know about rivers today to figure out that there must have been a river there before.

Uniformitarianism helps scientists understand how things change over time, and it's a really important tool for geologists who study the Earth's history.