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6 years ago

The Abyss of Time

Scotland is part of the bedrock of geology, so to speak.

In the late 18th century, Scottish farmer and scientist James Hutton helped found the science of geology. Observing how wind and water weathered rocks and deposited layers of soil at his farm in Berwickshire, Hutton made a conceptual leap into a deeper and expansive view of time. After spending decades observing the processes of erosion and sedimentation, and traveling the Scottish countryside in search of fossils, stream cuts and interesting rock formations, Hutton became convinced that Earth had to be much older than 6,000 years, the common belief in Western civilization at the time.

In 1788, a boat trip to Siccar Point, a rocky promontory in Berwickshire, helped crystallize Hutton’s view. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired this image of the area on June 4, 2018, top. A closer view of Siccar Point is below.

At Siccar Point, Hutton was confronted with the juxtaposition of two starkly different types of rock—a gently sloping bed of young red sandstone that was over a near vertical slab of older graywacke that had clearly undergone intensive heating, uplift, buckling, and folding. Hutton argued to his two companions on the boat that the only way to get the two rock formations jammed up against one another at such an odd angle was that an enormous amount of time must have elapsed between when they had been deposited at the bottom of the ocean.

He was right.