Siccar Point
If there’s one place in the world at which the rocks speak clearly about the geological history of the Earth, it’s Siccar Point on the east coast of Scotland. When James Hutton and his colleagues John Playfair and James Hall found this remarkable formation while examining the coast from a small boat, they knew at once that they had found conclusive evidence that our planet is very, very old.
Here’s what Playfair wrote about that day:
We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean. An epocha still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe.... The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time. (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. V, pt. III, 1805)
In our class, we’ll consider the great questions of the history of the Earth while standing on the very rocks on which James Hutton laid the foundations of modern geology.
Copyright Wittenberg University 2007