Soru

The following passage is adapted from an essay on the history of geology.

Paragraph 1
In the late eighteenth century, the prevailing scientific consensus in Europe held that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, a view primarily derived from biblical chronology. Most geological features were explained by "catastrophism"—the theory that Earth’s landscape had been shaped rapidly by sudden, short-lived, worldwide disasters. For instance, mountains and valleys were believed to be the remnants of Noah’s flood. This framework left little room for gradual processes, framing geological history as a series of abrupt, dramatic interventions.

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James Hutton, a Scottish physician and naturalist, proposed a radically different view known as uniformitarianism. He argued that the geological forces shaping the Earth today—such as erosion, sedimentation, and volcanic activity—have operated at the same slow rate throughout the planet's history. To prove this theory, however, Hutton needed physical evidence of what he called "unconformities": points in the rock record where older, tilted layers of rock were overlaid by younger, horizontal layers, representing a vast gap in geological time during which erosion occurred before new rock deposited.

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Hutton found his definitive proof in 1788 at Siccar Point, a rocky promontory on the east coast of Scotland. There, he and his companions observed a dramatic junction: vertical layers of greywacke (a dark sandstone) were directly capped by horizontal layers of red sandstone. The sharp angle between the two rock formations demonstrated that the greywacke had been deposited, tilted vertically, eroded down to a flat surface, and then covered by the red sandstone over countless eons. The sheer scale of time required for these sequential processes to occur shattered the catastrophist timeline.

Which of the following best describes the relationship between Paragraph 3 and Paragraph 2?