YOUR OROGENOUS ZONES DEPT./
JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
“Here’s to the Prof of Geology,
Master of all Natural History.
Rare boy he, and rare boys we,
to know such a great curiosity.” — Pat Boone toasting James Mason in song
Consider Old College, the place where the science of geology was founded, and where the concept of Deep Time — a bit older than the Bible’s 6,000 years — was promulgated, often against very stiff opposition indeed. Consider that Old College architect William Playfair was the nephew of the eminent geologist John Playfair, one of Edinburgh’s deepest Deep Time geology thinkers. Consider that, tasked with finishing the college according to eminent but defunct Robert Adam’s design, the eminent younger Playfair chose a facing of luscious mellow Leith sandstone, with columns cut in one piece from single beds. Consider my View of the Quadrangle in 1984; blackened with sulfur and soot, intruded by the parked fossil fuel burners that helped cause the corrosion. Then consider how many more cars we’ve added to the world since then [though, thankfully banished from the Quad.] Then read the HARROWING article below:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/extreme-climate-change-history/617793/
Salisbury Craigs and Arthur’s Seat. Hiking where James Hutton hiked, learning to see it through his eyes, had a greater effect on me than I was able to understand back in that Deep Time. “Deep Time Geology” is built into the lore of the Edinburgh experience. Half the reason for the city’s intellectual eminence is due to the eminence of the craigs — the fact that these rocks sit a mere mile away from the crowded city, on public park land (actually Royal; thanks your Majesty). Queens, citizens, bums, rogues, foreign students and tourists alike can just clamber all over them whenever they like. And when they do, inevitably, they learn about Hutton’s and Playfair’s Deep Time.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/father-modern-geology-youve-never-heard-180960203/
“Hutton observed that basaltic rocks exposed in the Salisbury Craigs, just on the outskirts of Edinburgh, seemed to have baked adjacent enclosing sediments lying both below and above the basalt. This simple observation indicated that the basalt was emplaced within the sedimentary succession while it was still sufficiently hot to have altered the sedimentary material. Clearly, basalt could not form in this way as a precipitate from the primordial ocean as Werner had claimed. Furthermore, the observations at Edinburgh indicated that the basalt intruded the sediments from below—in short, it came from the Earth’s interior, a process in clear conflict with Neptunist theory.” — Britannica.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12861/12861-h/12861-h.htm
Hutton’s colleague and student, successor and champion John Playfair was no Pat Boone, but he did utter the most famous quote in geology in his 1803 eulogy of James Hutton, given before the Edinburgh Royal Society. Salisbury Craigs were impressive; but skeptics and students needed simple, unambiguous evidence of Deep Time. Playfair described his feelings on the bright day when Hutton took him and Sir James Hall in a boat around the rocky coast of Siccar Point, to point out two distinct layers of rock — only two — to see if they, too, could see them as Hutton saw them, in Deep Time:
“We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean. An epocha still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe….The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”
— (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. V, pt. III, 1805)
It is worth pointing out, as an mnemonic device, and since nobody else ever has: the the name of Siccar Point, the smoking gun of Deep Time, comes from the Scots word siccar, which is cognate with Dutch zeker and German sicher, meaning “sure; certain; well-founded; bedrock.”
Hutton was the father of the rock cycle — the idea that, over aeons, mountains turn to jagged boulders which turn to rounded rocks which turns to smooth pebbles which turns either to sand (marine) or silt (riparian) which, in turn, turn back into rock, which gets compressed and sheared and intruded and metamorphosed and uplifted; and then eroded back down again. Playfair was the father of (what we would today call) the fractal geometry of watercourses and river systems and their role in that rock cycle.
“Every river appears to consist of a main trunk, fed from a variety of branches, each running in a valley proportioned to its size, and all of them together forming a system of vallies, communicating with one another, and having such a nice adjustment of their declivities that none of them join the principal valley on too high or too low a level,—a circumstance which would he infinitely improbable if each of these vallies were not the work of the stream that flows in it.” — Playfair’s Law of Accordant Junctions; from Illustrations Of Huttontonian Theory
The reason I mention all this, is that I just found about a 15-foot section of washed-out wall in Limerock Canyon, where Deep Time, and the rock cycle, and the role of flow in the structure of the land, have been so astonishingly laid bare, that my “mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” In the next blog, I will try to explain and interpret why I think this muddy cutaway I found is so eminently fascinating.
The Valley Village View 