means james hutton, the 18th-century founder of modern geology, who argued earth was shaped slowly over unimaginably deep time, not carved in a single biblical catastrophe.

from james hutton (1726-1797) was an edinburgh gentleman farmer who noticed his fields eroding and rocks forming in layers, and realized the same slow processes must have built and rebuilt earth's surface over eons, not thousands of years. his 1788 visit to siccar point, where tilted rock layers met horizontal ones at a stark angle, became geology's founding vision, later dubbed deep time by john mcphee.