A Blasphemous Discovery
On a June afternoon in 1788, James Hutton stood at Siccar Point, a remote cliff on Scotland’s coast, beside fellow Enlightenment thinkers. Before them was a rocky seam unlike anything they had seen. Vertical slabs of ancient gray rock cut into younger horizontal red sandstone. This, Hutton declared, was no accident—it was evidence that the Earth had endured vast, immeasurable cycles of change. In that moment, he openly defied the widely accepted view that the world was just 6,000 years old.
The Theory That Challenged Time
Hutton had already laid out his radical idea in two 1785 papers presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He argued the Earth was shaped by ongoing processes: erosion, sedimentation, burial, heating, and uplift. Rocks were not relics of a single event, but the product of deep, repeated cycles. At Siccar Point, he showed that millions of years must have passed between the formation of the two visible rock layers.
Tools: Chemistry and Fieldwork
With help from chemist Joseph Black, Hutton investigated how heat and pressure transform sediment. His study, packed with fossils and equipment, reflected decades of self-funded research. He spent years walking the British countryside, surveying land and analyzing stone.
A Quiet Death, A Loud Echo
Hutton died in 1797, largely unknown outside Edinburgh. But his colleague John Playfair wrote a detailed account, which later inspired Charles Lyell. Lyell’s writings, in turn, influenced Charles Darwin, who brought them aboard the Beagle in 1832.
On a June afternoon in 1788, James Hutton stood at Siccar Point, a rocky cliff on Scotland’s coast, and pointed to a seam where vertical gray rock cut into younger red sandstone.
It was his proof that Earth was unimaginably old—far older than the 6,000 years most people… pic.twitter.com/BXLmsTIjrZ
— Detective Tiger's Stories (@TigerDetective) April 29, 2025