Question

In late eighteenth-century geology, Abraham Gottlob Werner’s Neptunist framework posited that all terrestrial rock strata, including crystalline basalt, precipitated sequentially from a primeval global ocean. When Werner’s adherents encountered the hexagonal basalt columns of the Auvergne region in central France, they initially attempted to subsume these structures into Neptunism by characterizing them as chemical precipitates deposited during an ancient aqueous epoch. However, French naturalist Nicolas Desmarest had previously demonstrated that Auvergne basalt streams unequivocally originated from cooled lava flows linked to extinct volcanic cones. Rather than abandoning Neptunism altogether, later Wernerians reformulated their core doctrine: they conceded the volcanic provenance of Auvergne basalt while maintaining that such volcanism was merely a localized, recent anomaly—a secondary phenomenon caused by the subterranean combustion of coal seams rather than a primordial heat source intrinsic to the Earth's interior. By framing volcanic activity as an accidental, surface-level disturbance, Wernerians sought to preserve the foundational premise of Neptunism—that global aqueous precipitation alone governed the primary formation of the Earth's crust—without directly contradicting Desmarest’s undeniable empirical observations.

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage regarding the later Wernerians' strategy in addressing Desmarest's findings?