Siccar Point: The Birthplace of Modern Geology – British Geological Survey

The World was a rather different place in the late 18th century. A great majority of people in the West believed the Earth was not older than 6,000 years old. Rocks were formed immediately after the Biblical flood of Noah. Fossils were simply the remains of animals that had died in the flood. Scientific facts that are so obvious to us today such as plate tectonics and continental drift were not connected. For instance, a core tenet is the geological uniformitarianism which assumes that most of the processes act with the same intensity in the present as they did in the past such as erosion and sedimentation. The concept was not out there until Scottish farmer and scientist James Hutton. Geological uniformity enables estimation of the age of rock layers.

Hutton observed how wind and water weathered rocks and deposited layers of soil at his farm in Berwickshire for many decades. He hunted for fossils along stream cuts. He became convinced that Earth had to be much older than 6,000 years. In 1788 Hutton took a boat trip to Siccar Point. There his ideas took shape when he saw the juxtaposition of a slanted bed of young red sandstone that was over a near vertical slab of older graywacke that had clearly undergone intense alteration (heating, uplift, buckling, and folding). Such an alteration could only be possible through a very long time scale process. This short documentary by the British Geological Survey tells the story of revelation Hutton experienced in Siccar Point that changed the science of geology.