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The cliff that changed our understanding of time

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http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180312...th-history

EXCERPT: . . . Long before [farmer James] Hutton arrived, Siccar Point was a site of historical and geographic importance. More than 1,000 years earlier, the ancient Britons built a small hill fort here to warn off invaders from the north. But no-one had realised how Siccar Point illustrated the story of the Earth itself. In fact, almost everyone in 18th-Century society still believed the Earth was somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 years old, an estimate based on literal Biblical interpretations. Hutton believed that the Earth was in fact far older. It was a realisation that would change the course of science.

[...] “Hutton realised that the formation and movement of these rocks to create the coastline we see at Siccar Point couldn’t happen in sudden cataclysms over years or decades,” said Iain Stewart, geologist at the University of Plymouth. “He understood this concept of deep time: that you need tens of millions of years to effect big changes on the planet. And this is perfectly illustrated by the unconformity between these oceanic and terrestrial rock layers.”

Hutton’s ideas started to become mainstream in the early 19th Century after Playfair published his 1802 book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, summarising his friend’s theories. Included was an illustration of Siccar Point. Several decades later, the geologist Sir Charles Lyell wrote the then-groundbreaking three-volume Principles of Geology, bringing Hutton’s revolutionary ideas to the general public and proposing an indefinitely long age for the Earth....

MORE: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180312...th-history
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