James Hutton and The Restless Earth

Award winning Scottish folksinger, songwriter and storyteller, Karine Polwart celebrates the 300th anniversary of James Hutton’s birth, the Scottish scientist and philosopher known as the father of geology.

With specially performed music and song, she explores one of Hutton’s most radical and challenging concepts - deep time. Hutton was the first to hypothesise that the formation of the earth had taken unfathomably long stretches of time, far, far longer than the eight thousand or so years that studies of the bible had suggested. And that radical theory would be confirmed by a discovery Hutton made when he and his two companions stepped ashore from a boat trip to Siccar Point on the east coast of Scotland in June 1788. What he saw was sandstone eroded away to reveal sharp vertical shards of the rock greywacke laid down some 60 million years earlier -what geologist today would call an unconformity.

Recreating that journey for the programme Karine is joined by geologist Dr Angus Miller and David Farrier, writer and Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh.

Angus explains just how influential Hutton’s theory became through the writing of his companion on the trip - John Playfair

"The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible to how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow."

The truth that Hutton revealed was indeed far stranger than fiction, not only upending the received wisdom about the age of the earth but would have far reaching consequences, giving successors like Charles Darwin a timescale that would allow the incremental changes of natural selection to take place.

For David Farrier Hutton’s discoveries opened up not only the deep past but the prospect of the deep future. His book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looks at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future.

Karine weaves these ideas together in the music threaded through the programme blending the events of Hutton’s visit with these challenging ideas about our responsibility to those far off generations to come.

The idea of seeing intimate, human connections to the geology of the planet is taken up by the artist Illana Halperin. Her work explores where human time and geological time scales intersect most notably in how she shares a birthday with the Icelandic volcano Eldfell that she visits on every major milestone as they age together.

The programme builds to a crescendo of all these ideas overlaid and blended into a powerful message of how we’ve become a planetary force capable of great feats for both good and ill.

Written, composed and performed by Karine Polwart
Sound design and additional music by Pippa Murphy
Piano: Dave Milligan
Producer: Peter McManus