Siccar Point

Siccar Point is a rocky promontory on the east coast of Scotland, in Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders. It is renowned in the history of geology as the site where James Hutton, on a boat trip in 1788, examined an angular unconformity in which near-vertical marine sandstones from the early Silurian period, roughly 440 million years old, are overlain by gently dipping terrestrial sandstones from the late Devonian period, roughly 375 million years old, a 65-million-year gap recording an ocean closure, mountain building, erosion and renewed burial. That unconformity became key evidence for uniformitarianism, the idea that the same natural processes acting today have shaped the Earth throughout its history. In October 2022 the International Union of Geological Sciences named Siccar Point the first of its 100 global geological heritage sites. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/