Deep Time

Deep time is a term introduced and applied by John McPhee to the concept of geologic time in his Basin and Range (1981), parts of which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine. The modern concept shows huge changes over the age of the Earth which has been determined to be, after a long and complex history of developments, around 4.55 billion years. Hutton based his view of deep time on a form of geochemistry that had developed in Scotland and Scandinavia from the 1750s onward. As mathematician John Playfair, one of Hutton's friends and colleagues in the Scottish Enlightenment, remarked upon seeing the strata of the angular unconformity at Siccar Point with Hutton and James Hall in June 1788, "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time".

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