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James Hutton and the Discovery of Earth's Antiquity
by Jack Repcheck
The team continued south. As the sailors looked up at the
rocky cliffs, they saw the angular stone wall of a now roofless and
abandoned chapel at the top of one of the hills, probably just a few
hundred yards from the edge of the bluff. It was an unusual sight in such
a desolate spot. Maybe this previously sacred land would now mark a
different kind of shrine.
The boat quickly neared Siccar Point, the next headland on
their course. After they rounded the protrusion, Hutton urged the pilot to
land the boat. The sand of Pease Bay unfortunately did not extend to
Siccar Point, so the boat scraped to a halt on rutted stone. But no one
cared much about the boat. As they stood on the rocky beach staring up at
the cliff face to their right, it was as if they were looking at a
painting left by the Creator to show the wonder of His world. At the
bottom of the cliff was the gray-colored primary micaceous schistus
exposure, but the layers were not horizontal like the ones seen on a
typical quarry wall. They were vertical, standing straight up, like a row
of books on a shelf. Above the booklike layers sat a couple of feet of
nondescript muddle, composed of large fragments of the schistus. Then,
above the hardened muck was another large exposure of layered rocks, but
these layers were horizontal and they had the distinct red hue of the
exposure just seen at Pease Bay.
Hutton, an animated man at all times, was gleeful. Upon
collecting himself, he explained to his companions what they were
observing. The schistus that was now vertical had originally been laid
down in horizontal deposits, the only way that sediments can form. Eroded
grains from an ancient continent had flowed into a sea and settled at the
bottom. Since deposits usually settle at a modest rate, perhaps only an
inch a year, it took hundreds of thousands of years for enough sediment to
build up and apply the pressure to the bottom layers that caused them to
be changed to rock. Subterranean heat also assisted in this
transformation. Then, the intensity of the heat, and perhaps some other
additional force, had caused the once horizontal strata to buckle the way
a leather belt would if you held it taut between your hands and then
brought your hands together. As a result, the layers folded and became
vertical; in the process they also rose above sea level. The
once-submerged stratified rocks had become dry land. Immediately, erosion
began to work its magic all over again, causing the removal of the tops of
the buckled rocks. Over time, this land became covered by water again,
either from the sea level rising or the land sinking, because the layer of
stony muddle represented the early stages of submersion, when waves broke
up rocks along the shore. Then, as the vertical stratified rocks settled
deeply under the water, new sediments started piling up, this time formed
with red-hued grains from different surface rocks. Eventually, these new
sediments also consolidated into rocks, affected by pressure and the same
subterranean heat that had once acted on the vertical strata. Hutton and
his friends were now looking at this dry-land exposure because the area
had been raised above the sea yet again, but with less violence this time
since there was no new buckling. Collectively, the making of Siccar
Point must have taken an unfathomable length of time—much, much longer
than 6,000 years.
Finally, here was irrefutable
proof. The earth was immeasurably old.
Excerpted from The Man Who Found Time by Jack Repcheck. Copyrighted by Jack Repcheck 2003, all rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Perseus Publishing.
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