Same book openly mocked catastrophism, which turns out to have been mostly right.
The "plate tectonics revolution" didn't hit until the 1960s, and is really just warmed-over "continental drift", a term that has been deprecated the same way the web standards have deprecated TABLE and FORM, but both are still in use. I'm pretty sure I learned about it outside K-12, probably via magazines, but a cousin of mom's had been a teacher for a while and had a sort of diorama about PT in his basement.