This path is steep, and slippery, and a little bit dangerous,
so excuse me if I seem a bit distracted,
I'm trying to concentrate on balancing the camera,
balancing me, and saying words.
This isn't going to be an in-depth video about geology:
I'm not a geologist. But today I'm on the road,
and my route has taken me past something
that I've wanted to put my own two feet on for a long time.
This is Siccar Point, about an hour east of Edinburgh in Scotland.
And yeah, it just looks like some rocks on the coast, but:
this is one of the most important geological sites in the world.
And what I love about this story here is that it combines
something that happened a long time ago,
more than 200 years,
with something that happened a Long Time Ago,
hundreds of millions of years.
In 1788 James Hutton, who's now known as the father of modern geology
visited here in a boat.
He was looking for places that would help his theory
that the earth was far, far older than people thought at the time.
He was looking for two types of rock right next to each other
in a way that could only have been made
over what we now call "geological time".
435 million years ago, a type of grey sandstone called greywacke
was laid down at the bottom of what was then the ocean.
Over millions of years it was folded tilted and uplifted,
millimeter by millimeter, until the layers became almost vertical.
and then 370 million years ago, red sandstone was laid down on top of it.
And over the hundreds of millions of years that followed,
as animals crawled out of the ocean and dinosaurs evolved and went extinct
and eventually humans came along,
there was more uplift, more tilting, more erosion
and now, today, above sea level
you have something that should have been impossible
according to scholars in the 18th century:
two completely different ages, types and directions of rock
locked to each other, clear for the eye to see
It's called an "unconformity".
Hutton had found other unconformities before, and he'd find more afterwards.
They're not too rare if you know what you're looking for,
and he knew what he was looking for.
But this was the most obvious, the most dramatic, the most convincing.
Not that it did convince everyone.
Opinions don't change that quickly, and the scientific process is slow.
It took more than one person and more than one lifetime
for the theory to become properly accepted.
But now if you've done basic, high-school earth science: none of this is surprising, right?
That's how the whole planet works.
And that's why I wanted to stop by here, that's why I wanted to show this to more people.
Because my big question is:
is there anything like this left?
Anything that can be explained in a couple of minutes to a modern person,
that describes something that's now obvious to pretty much everyone,
but that is still sitting undiscovered somewhere out there in the world
until one person with the right knowledge is in the right place.
I think it's unlikely there's anything like that left.
With eight billion people on the planet
and satellite photography of pretty much every part of it
I think it's probable that we've got all the low hanging fruit.
But wouldn't it be wonderful if for once, just for once, somewhere in the world,
we got a new discovery like this?