RE Geology Time Line.

A good book I have is “The Man Who Found Time”, x Jack Repcheck 2003. The subtitle is “James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity”.

As Stuart mentioned it is very difficult for us humans to understand the time span of the creation of the world as we know it today.

Quoting from the book-----Hutton’s influence on Charles Darwin was significant. While aboard the HMS Beagle in late 1831, en route to the islands where his theory of evolution would begin to be hatched, Darwin carefully studied a recently published book by Charles Lyell, ‘The Principles of Geology’ (1830). Lyell had rediscovered Hutton’s work a generation after it had been forgotten by all but a few scholars. For Darwin, the key insight in Lyell’s book was that the earth is profoundly old, an idea that Lyell properly credits to James Hutton in the first pages of his book.

The ancient age of the earth came as a revelation to Darwin. However, while exploring St. Jago in the Cape Verde Island chain off the coast of Africa- the first stop the Beagle made – he noticed an undisturbed layer of rocks, called a stratum, formed of shells and coral. It was so undisturbed, in fact, that it looked exactly like a living coral reef that had somehow hardened to stone. Such a band of shells and coral was not too unusual, but this one was 30 feet above sea level. The only way the stratum of delicate ocean fossils could have been raised so high was through the gradual uplifting of the land, a process that Lyell, and before him Hutton, had described. Gentle uplifting of that magnitude would have taken eons. The stratum on St. Jago showed Darwin that Lyell and Hutton were right – the earth was ancient.

Go digging, in a library not the earth, for this good read. ISBN 0-7434-5087-6