Quotes About Geology

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

Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.

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.

It turned out that under the western United States there was a huge cauldron of magma, a colossal volcanic hot spot, which erupted cataclysmically every 600,000 years or so. The last such eruption was just over 600,000 years ago. The hot spot is still there. These days we call it Yellowstone National Park. We

failed to spot the caldera: virtually the whole park—2.2 million acres—was caldera.

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

and Range, p.187. 10 seamounts that he called

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

For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere.

Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.

Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland.

The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror. British geologist Derek V.Ager

Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains. For Cretaceous (from the Latin for chalk) we are indebted to a Belgian geologist with the perky name of J. J. d'Omalius d'Halloy.

among them Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent") and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent").

Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages.

the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot, and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discovered an interest in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geological thinking.

On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, "and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.

Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306, 662, 400 years to complete.

a long time ago when cataclysms were common as sneezes and land masses slid around the globe looking for places to settle down and become continents, someone introduced us at a party.

By the age of twelve, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known local geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park. Not aware of his youth, one of these correspondents nominated Robert for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and soon thereafter a letter arrived inviting him to deliver a lecture before the club.

Bacteria mineralized the rocks; they deposited the iron. They made the geology we see.

In the 1830s geology was more than new: it was fashionable.

Yucca Mountain isn't pretty. And it also isn't large. From far away, the mountain's just a squat bulge in the middle of the desert, essentially just debris from a bigger, stronger mountain that erupted millions of years ago and hurled its broken pieces into piles across the earth.