Siccar Point

 Today's the day ........................ for an unconformity

Any seriously-minded geologist will want, at some time in their life, to go to Siccar Point just south of Dunbar on the Berwickshire coast.

The stripey grey rocks in the bay in this picture are called greywackes.  They were formed from layers of sediment deposited on the floor of an ancient ocean.  These layers were subsequently folded vertically, uplifted and eroded producing an uneven land surface on to which the other reddish-coloured rocks in the picture were then deposited as sand and gravel.  These rocks known as Old Red Sandstone have a completely different gently-dipping bedding.  The difference in age between the two rocks is some 55 million years and the irregular surface between the vertical and the gently dipping rock-layers is known as an unconformity.

It was James Hutton (1726 - 1797) a man of genius, living nearby, who used the rocks at Siccar Point as the defining proof for his revolutionary Theory of the Earth  published in 1788.  Most people at this time thought the world was no older than a few thousand years.  Hutton realised that earth processes are cyclical - and that geological time is virtually unlimited.

It was the start of the science of geology - and James Hutton is recognised as its founding father ......................