WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

1
00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:03.520
This path is steep, and slippery,
and a little bit dangerous,

2
00:00:03.520 --> 00:00:05.280
so excuse me if I seem a bit distracted,

3
00:00:05.280 --> 00:00:07.200
I'm trying to concentrate on
balancing the camera,

4
00:00:07.200 --> 00:00:09.440
balancing me,
and saying words.

5
00:00:09.440 --> 00:00:11.440
This isn't going to be an
in-depth video about geology:

6
00:00:11.440 --> 00:00:13.840
I'm not a geologist.
But today I'm on the road,

7
00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:15.760
and my route has taken me
past something

8
00:00:15.760 --> 00:00:18.640
that I've wanted to put my own
two feet on for a long time.

9
00:00:19.200 --> 00:00:23.120
This is Siccar Point, about an hour
east of Edinburgh in Scotland.

10
00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:27.040
And yeah, it just looks like
some rocks on the coast, but:

11
00:00:27.040 --> 00:00:29.840
this is one of the most important
geological sites in the world.

12
00:00:30.480 --> 00:00:33.120
And what I love about this story here
is that it combines

13
00:00:33.120 --> 00:00:34.640
something that happened
a long time ago,

14
00:00:34.640 --> 00:00:35.600
more than 200 years,

15
00:00:36.240 --> 00:00:39.040
with something that happened
a Long Time Ago,

16
00:00:39.040 --> 00:00:40.800
hundreds of millions of years.

17
00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:45.520
In 1788 James Hutton, who's now known
as the father of modern geology

18
00:00:45.520 --> 00:00:46.800
visited here in a boat.

19
00:00:46.800 --> 00:00:48.720
He was looking for places that
would help his theory

20
00:00:48.720 --> 00:00:51.760
that the earth was far, far older
than people thought at the time.

21
00:00:51.760 --> 00:00:54.880
He was looking for two types of rock
right next to each other

22
00:00:54.880 --> 00:00:56.400
in a way that could only
have been made

23
00:00:56.400 --> 00:00:58.720
over what we now call
"geological time".

24
00:00:59.760 --> 00:01:05.680
435 million years ago, a type
of grey sandstone called greywacke

25
00:01:05.680 --> 00:01:08.080
was laid down at the bottom
of what was then the ocean.

26
00:01:08.080 --> 00:01:11.920
Over millions of years
it was folded tilted and uplifted,

27
00:01:11.920 --> 00:01:15.520
millimeter by millimeter,
until the layers became almost vertical.

28
00:01:15.520 --> 00:01:20.560
and then 370 million years ago,
red sandstone was laid down on top of it.

29
00:01:20.560 --> 00:01:23.200
And over the hundreds of millions
of years that followed,

30
00:01:23.200 --> 00:01:27.600
as animals crawled out of the ocean
and dinosaurs evolved and went extinct

31
00:01:27.600 --> 00:01:29.440
and eventually humans came along,

32
00:01:29.440 --> 00:01:32.080
there was more uplift, more tilting, more erosion

33
00:01:32.080 --> 00:01:34.160
and now, today, above sea level

34
00:01:34.160 --> 00:01:36.720
you have something that
should have been impossible

35
00:01:36.720 --> 00:01:38.720
according to scholars in the 18th century:

36
00:01:38.720 --> 00:01:42.880
two completely different ages,
types and directions of rock

37
00:01:43.520 --> 00:01:45.680
locked to each other,
clear for the eye to see

38
00:01:45.680 --> 00:01:47.360
It's called an "unconformity".

39
00:01:48.240 --> 00:01:51.760
Hutton had found other unconformities before,
and he'd find more afterwards.

40
00:01:51.760 --> 00:01:53.680
They're not too rare if you
know what you're looking for,

41
00:01:53.680 --> 00:01:55.200
and he knew what he was looking for.

42
00:01:55.200 --> 00:01:59.040
But this was the most obvious,
the most dramatic, the most convincing.

43
00:01:59.040 --> 00:02:00.560
Not that it did convince everyone.

44
00:02:01.520 --> 00:02:04.480
Opinions don't change that quickly,
and the scientific process is slow.

45
00:02:04.480 --> 00:02:07.040
It took more than one person
and more than one lifetime

46
00:02:07.040 --> 00:02:08.640
for the theory to become properly accepted.

47
00:02:09.200 --> 00:02:13.520
But now if you've done basic, high-school
earth science: none of this is surprising, right?

48
00:02:13.520 --> 00:02:14.800
That's how the whole planet works.

49
00:02:15.600 --> 00:02:19.920
And that's why I wanted to stop by here,
that's why I wanted to show this to more people.

50
00:02:20.480 --> 00:02:22.080
Because my big question is:

51
00:02:22.080 --> 00:02:24.000
is there anything like this left?

52
00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:26.960
Anything that can be explained in a
couple of minutes to a modern person,

53
00:02:26.960 --> 00:02:29.920
that describes something that's now
obvious to pretty much everyone,

54
00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:35.040
but that is still sitting undiscovered
somewhere out there in the world

55
00:02:35.040 --> 00:02:38.320
until one person with the right knowledge
is in the right place.

56
00:02:38.320 --> 00:02:40.240
I think it's unlikely there's 
anything like that left.

57
00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:41.760
With eight billion people on the planet 

58
00:02:41.760 --> 00:02:44.640
and satellite photography of 
pretty much every part of it

59
00:02:44.640 --> 00:02:47.600
I think it's probable that we've got
all the low hanging fruit.

60
00:02:47.600 --> 00:02:52.320
But wouldn't it be wonderful if for once,
just for once, somewhere in the world,

61
00:02:53.280 --> 00:03:03.840
we got a new discovery like this?