Geological Pioneers
Scotland gave the study of geology to the world. Dr James Hutton (1726 - 1797), who lived and worked in Edinburgh during the period of the Scottish Enlightenment, was the first to challenge the conventional view of the age of the Earth. Interpretation of the scriptures by Archbishop Ussher in 1658 gave a precise figure of 4,004 years BC and anyone who challenged this view was regarded as a dangerous heretic. Hutton made many geological observations during his extensive travels in Britain and across Europe.
He considered that the "vast proportion of present rocks are composed of more ancient formations"; in other words, sedimentary rocks, such as sandstones and shales, are the product of older strata which have been 'recycled'. Hutton thought that this continuous recycling process took place in long-disappeared oceans over aeons of geological time, as sediments were carried to the sea by rivers. And so it proved. In these processes, Hutton could see "no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end". So began his challenge to the established view of the age of the Earth. We now reliably estimate the age of the Earth as around 4,500 million years. Publication of his Theory of the Earth in 1788 secured for James Hutton enduring recognition as the father of modern geology and an important place in the annals of science.
Hugh Miller, a stonemason from Cromarty, also made a major contribution to the development of the subject. In 1841 he published a collection of articles entitled The Old Red Sandstone describing the wealth of fish remains fossilised in the sandstones of his local area. His popular scientific accounts were widely read.
In 1835 Britain became the first country in the world to establish a geological survey and much of the early work was undertaken in Scotland. Benjamin Peach and John Home were foremost among the surveyors, working in the Highlands during the summer and in the Southern Uplands during the colder months. They produced geological maps, many of which have not been bettered to this day, and accompanying memoirs which provided the first detailed description of the rocks, fossils and landforms of Scotland.
The Assynt area of the Northwest Highlands is one of the most varied and complex geological areas in Scotland. Peach and Home returned there many times to unravel the complexities of the rock structures and in 1907 published their classic geological memoir entitled The Geological Structure of the Northwest Highlands of Scotland.
Scotland also had a number of pioneers in glaciation, stimulated no doubt by the visit to Scotland of Louis Agassiz, the eminent Swiss glaciologist, in 1840. One was T. F. Jamieson, an estate factor from Ellon. He studied the deposits of the Ice Age in Scotland during the mid-nineteenth century. He was the first to recognise that the land mass was weighed down by the thickness of ice which accumulated during the Ice Age and that it rose again when the ice melted.