when you look at a rock, what do you see? most of us probably see ... well, a rock:grey, brown, maybe a few sparkles. nothing too exciting. but to 18th-century geologist james hutton,rocks were more than just rocks. instead, they were the key to earth’s history-- billions of years of stone, shifting, melting, crunching, twisting, and re-forming. a history that he discovered in a time whenmost people believed that the world was 6,000 years old. [intro]
james hutton was born in edinburgh, scotlandon june 3, 1726. he was a bit of a floater, studying at severaluniversities throughout his youth. this wasn’t that big a deal -- he had apretty large inheritance and several farms, and was able to live comfortably without findinga specific trade. according to his teachers, he didn’t likemath very much, but he did have a strong interest in chemistry. he qualified as a doctor, and wrote his medicaldissertation on the circulation of blood, which he believed -- correctly, but for thewrong reasons -- was constantly being destroyed and renewed.
eventually, hutton decided that he didn’treally want to pursue medicine. he spent some time on his farms, then movedback to edinburgh in 1768, and began to develop his ideas about geology -- which also involvedrenewal and recirculation. in hutton’s time, a lot of people believedthat earth was shaped by catastrophes like the ones in the bible. but hutton thought earth actually went througha constant cycle of destruction and renewal. he proposed that rocks and soil are erodedand swept into the sea, then compacted into bedrock before being twisted and turned byenormous pressure a few years after he first came up with thistheory, hutton discovered evidence for it
in a few different rock formations. the most famous of these discoveries was atsiccar point, a cliff on the eastern coast of scotland that features layers of red sandstoneand greywacke -- a darker type of sandstone. the layers were sitting on each other, butthey were also running in layers perpendicular to one another, in what we now call an angularunconformity. he hypothesized that only great amounts oftime and great pressure could have offset the rocks -- much longer than 6,000 years. and, as we know now, he was right. this feature at siccar point -- and severalothers around scotland -- are called hutton’s
unconformity in his honor. he also discovered that granite was an igneousrock, by observing tendrils of granite that had made their way into rock like sandstone-- which he realized could only have happened at very high temperatures. hutton believed that this was strong evidencethat there was molten rock below the surface of the earth, and that . he published his findings in a paper in 1788,but his theories didn’t always gain traction because they often contradicted the idea thatearth was 6,000 years old. plus, a lot of other scientists’ geologicaltheories incorporated the great flood described
in the bible. hutton’s ideas didn’t. but a lot of his work turned out to be accurate,even though he didn’t have access to technologies like carbon dating, which would have put actualnumbers on the ages of rocks. hutton also paved the way for future scientists,like 19th-century british geologist charles lyell, to develop a theory called uniformitarianism. uniformitarianism is the idea that the processesthat shape the world now, also shaped it in the past. since the way the earth forms now is basicallythe same as how it formed in the past, scientists can work backward and figure out what happenedin the past.
by assuming that natural laws function inthe same way across space and time, we don’t need major catastrophes to explain how earthformed. instead, we can show that it’s the result of slow processes over enormous spansof time. thanks to hutton, the picture of our worldgot a lot more complex. he /was/ wrong about some stuff, but many of his ideas helped shapedgeological concepts that we still use today. not too bad for a guy who’s famous for sayingthat the lord should pity the backside that is -- and i quote -- “clagged to a headthat will hunt stones.†thanks for watching this episode of scishow,which was brought to you by our patrons on patreon. if you want to help support thisshow, just go to patreon.com/scishow. and
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