Our Dynamic Earth & James Hutton's Deep Time
Why is it significant?
In front of you, a white roof stretches over steel masts like a giant tent pitched at the foot of the cliffs. This is Our Dynamic Earth, a science centre that opened in 1999, and its choice of site is no accident.
Key Facts
| Place | Our Dynamic Earth & James Hutton's Deep Time |
|---|---|
| Address | Our Dynamic Earth, 112-116 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AS, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95050, -3.17440 |
| Part of Walk | Climbing a Volcano: Arthur's Seat & Holyrood Park, Edinburgh |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you, a white roof stretches over steel masts like a giant tent pitched at the foot of the cliffs. This is Our Dynamic Earth, a science centre that opened in 1999, and its choice of site is no accident. A few streets west of here, on St John's Hill, lived the man who taught the world to read time in stone.
James Hutton was born in Edinburgh in 1726. He studied medicine but never really practised it, made money from a chemical business, and then ran a farm in the Borders, where for years he watched the rain wash soil off his fields and into the streams. Soil goes down to the sea, he reasoned. On the seabed it hardens into layers of rock. Heat inside the earth lifts those layers up again as new land, and rain and frost slowly wear them down. And the cycle repeats... over and over.
If that was true, the earth had to be unimaginably old, far older than the six thousand years many of his contemporaries took from a literal reading of the Bible. In 1785 Hutton presented his theory to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1788 he wrote the line that still gives geologists goosebumps: no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
That same year he took two friends by boat to a rocky headland on the Berwickshire coast called Siccar Point. There he showed them grey layers of rock standing on end, worn flat and then covered by red sandstone lying calmly on top. Each set of layers meant a whole cycle of sea, rock, uplift and erosion. One of those friends, the mathematician John Playfair, later wrote that the mind seemed to grow giddy looking so far into the abyss of time.
Hutton was a sociable man who dined every week with Adam Smith and the chemist Joseph Black, but his own writing was famously hard going, and his ideas spread mainly through Playfair's clearer book. Today he is often called the father of modern geology, and his evidence is right behind this building. Walk south along Queen's Drive and take the path that climbs onto Salisbury Crags. It is the first real ascent, so pace yourself.