Granite formation: catastrophic in its suddenness

‘I fact, just about everything that was taught as recently as ten years ago about granitic magmatism has been turned on its head.’1 So concludes John Clemens in his overview paper about the origin of granite, published in the UK in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. In his introduction to Clemens’s paper and the accompanying discussion, editorial board member W.J. French explains that the origin of granite has been controversial since before James Hutton (1726–1797). After summarizing the turbulent disputes through the 1950s and up to the present, French boldly proclaimed that with Clemens’s paper, ‘The granite controversy ends’!