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.

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