Quotes About Earth

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.

For 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent—enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real.

It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.

Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist who became the most outspoken advocate of the idea that much of Earth had once been covered in ice, but alienated many in the process.

In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At

lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth's crust, not its core, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot.

Worse still, it isn't actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.

We live on a planet that more or less has an infinite capacity to surprise.

Whole continents sagged under the weight of so much ice and even now, twelve thousand years after the glaciers' withdrawal, are still rising back into place.

It shows that for most of its recent history Earth has been nothing like the stable and tranquil place that civilization has known, but rather has lurched violently between periods of warmth and brutal chill.

Without the Moon's steadying influence, the Earth would wobble like a dying top, with goodness knows what consequences for climate and weather. The Moon's steady gravitational influence keeps the Earth spinning at the right speed and angle to provide the sort of stability necessary for the long and successful development of life.

Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).

The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.

The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth's surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.

New Zealand, meanwhile, is part of the immense Indian Ocean plate even though it is nowhere near the Indian Ocean.

The Earth at last had a position in space.

It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.

Altogether, according to John McPhee, [geological ages] number in the "tens of dozens." Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any of them again.

Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth's history.

E. C. Bullard of Cambridge University in 1949 that this fluid part of the Earth's core revolves in a way that makes it, in effect, an electrical motor, creating the Earth's magnetic field.

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes

There is a lot of salt in the sea- enough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about five hundred feet. p280

At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.

it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.