The man who discovered the 'abyss of time' - BBC News

In 1788, three men set off to search a stretch of coast in Scotland. They were looking for a very special arrangement of rocks, which would reveal that Earth was far older than anybody thought. What they discovered would transform science, challenge long-held beliefs, and as one eminent scientist later put it, would burst the boundaries of time. My name's Richard Fisher, and over the past few years I've been researching and writing about what it takes to embrace a longer-term view. It's why I was drawn to the story of James Hutton, the father of geology. In the 18th century, Hutton and two companions scoured Scotland's east coast in search of a unique formation of rocks with gigantic timescales visibly written into their layers. I decided to retrace Hutton's steps to the place he found, called Sicker Point. But also maybe there are ways to, you know, learn from nature to build cities that are better for all living things. I was joined by Edinburgh University's David Farrier, an expert on deep time and author of the book Footprints. On our hike, I would learn why Sicker Point is one of the best places in the world to understand the deep geological past. But to my surprise, I would also discover a coastline that harbours signatures of the deep future too. So we're looking out over Cope Harbour, where I think James Hutton may have left, and then we've got Tornes Nuclear Power Station in the distance. It's quite a contrast. In the late 1700s, James Hutton, a farmer and keen geologist, noticed something curious about the rocks near his home. It was simply impossible for them to have formed if the biblical account of time was true. And the remarkable thing about Hutton is, I think, he arrived at an understanding of eternity through evidence, through what he could point to, particularly on his farm. He was able to get the first gleanings of the processes that form mountains and valleys that move continents. And, of course, it was, you know, these first inklings that then led him to look at rock formations and try to connect what he saw on his farm to what he saw in places like Sicker Point. Hutton had spotted an arrangement of rocks called an unconformity, a line separating two radically different rock formations, and within which tens of millions of years of time had passed. In 1788, he took two other researchers, John Playfair and James Hall, to show them what he had found. By this point, I think Hutton had already established many of his theories, but he was setting out to actually show people, to take people out into the landscape and say like, look, look at these rocks here, this makes my point. You seem eager to get there, David, you're rocketing ahead. Oh, no, yeah, I'm just thinking about my picnic. You can just see it, right? I'm staring into the abyss here. Are we going down? So, David, we made it after a two, three hour walk and a very steep slope clinging to a rope. We are finally here at one of the most, if not the most important location for geologists, Sicker Point. It's an extraordinarily charismatic place. I mean, you look at it and you know that if you walk down there, you can put your finger on the gap where 60 million years or so passed, without any trace being recorded, where the two rock formations meet. And it's an astonishing thought. And there's definitely that sense of the sublime there, of something that overwhelms and far exceeds the human scale. So how did Hutton know that his unconformity was special? He realised that there's only one way this particular arrangement of rocks could exist. More than 400 million years ago, the region was covered by an ancient ocean. In these waters, alternating layers of mudstone and greywacke were laid down. Over time, these rocks were then buried, squished and folded into vertical layers. That's the lower part of the formation. Then there was an epic pause. Tens of millions of years passed when little happened apart from slow, steady erosion. Eventually, around 370 million years ago, after the ocean had long gone, the environment was far drier. It was only then that the red sandstone of the upper layers began to be laid down. The line that separated these two rock types, that's Hutton's unconformity. That 65 million year gap where it's not recorded, it's just gone. All the creatures and all the processes, the many times around the sun, all that happened and that's not recorded in the rocks. A huge, huge gap. What I love about geology is that every rock tells a story. A story about an ancient environment and process. A quiet ocean punctuated by sudden surges of sediment. A desert with dry sand grains blown along by the wind. A tropical rainforest chock full of verdant life. But what the unconformity represents is an absence. There is no environment or process to describe here. However, there is a story. And it was a story that would change humanity's place in time. Hutton's discovery would prove to be more than a geological oddity. Before the 18th century, the biblical account of time was dominant. By one Christian calculation, the earth was only a few thousand years old. Hutton transformed that view. It wasn't an easy idea to swallow, was it? No, it was radically challenging to some of the fundamentals of how many people would have viewed the world. All of human history is just scratching the surface of planetary history. Writing about the visit to Siccar Point afterwards, Playfair wrote, the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time. In Hutton's words, time had no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end. And although Hutton didn't give a full account of the processes that he had an insight into, he opened the door. Darwin would not have been able to formulate his theory of natural selection without the affordance of deep time that Hutton allowed him. As well as geologists and scientists like Charles Darwin, Hutton's deep time discovery has also inspired many artists, writers and musicians over the years. I think what I do in my work is I connect things that appear to be disparate. I can see the motifs and threads that connect things and I'm trying to make one really difficult specialist thing connect with something that's really tangible and completely accessible. Later, I travelled west to the home of Corrine Polwart, a singer and songwriter who, during the pandemic lockdowns, was inspired to compose a song about Hutton and his unconformity. I wrote a piece called Sicker Point with my friend and neighbour Dave Milligan. He lives just five minutes up the road actually, across the football park. So the piece is part spoken word and part song and it sort of imagines James Hutton and James Hall and John Playfair going out in their boat to see the point and that moment of epiphany. The three men find no trace of a beginning, no prospect of an end. Only one thing is sure, everything dissolves and disappears. Tears and diatoms, walls and bones and oceans. The earth is never still, it's never still. And this one line, even rocks melt in the sun, and that's a reference to Robert Burns because one of his best loved songs is My Love's Like a Red, Red Rose. It goes, till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt away the sun. Oh, I will love thee still, my dear, till the sands of time have run. And it's just like a little B part for one of the verses for My Love's Like a Red, Red Rose, but almost certainly linked to the fact that he was aware of what Hutton was developing at the time. If he was still alive, what would Hutton have to say about deep time today? Well, if you return to Sicker Point, you may well remark on the striking changes to the coastline. There's a viewpoint that you get, then you can see North Berwick Law, which is an old volcanic plug, you can see the cement works at Dunbar, you can see Tornes Nuclear Power Station, and you can see the Bass Rock out in the Firth of Forth, all from essentially from where Sicker Point is. And there's something about that horizon line that I just find really is such a massive story, because you've got a clear sense of the deep time geology of it all. It's like really palpable, the two most obvious landmarks in that flat landscape. And then these two massive human made points of industry that have such consequences for, you know, like, a vast number of generations into the future. The very last line of the piece is, tell this time to the ether, tell this time to the ones who are still to come. This part of Scotland is famous for its deep time coast. But as I discovered, there are also signatures of our trouble present and long term future. A carbon intensive cement works, and a power station producing nuclear waste that will stay radioactive for thousands of years. Farrier calls it an Anthropocene coast. Striking to think that, you know, the world we inhabit has not always been the same, that there have been many different versions. It's worn many different guises, which, you know, inevitably makes me at least think about the world to come, the one we're making through climate change. By 2030, 2040, there's gonna be more concrete on Earth than all the fish, trees, all the human beings, if you add it up and put them on the scales. Yeah, which I think is an extraordinary statistic, isn't it? It is extraordinary and sobering, I think. And all of the cement that we've produced in the past and spread over the landscape creates another kind of unconformity. So many, you know, just, you know, human generations, but species have not, you know, left any trace in the book of the Earth. But we've begun to write our names in the densest, most durable ink in this book. And I think that's what sets us apart in our relationship with deep time, is that we are a part of it in a way that no other generation ever has been.