Quotes About Geology

Measuring nuclear yield depends on multiple parameters - the location and number of instruments, the geology of the area, the location of the seismic station in relation to the test site.

East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual.

In several sections, both natural in the banks of the Mississippi and its numerous arms, and where artificial canals had been cut, I observed erect stumps of trees, with their roots attached, buried in strata at different heights, one over the other.

If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants. Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz

Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals.

Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz thought the evidence of abrupt appearance, and the absence of ancestral forms in the Precambrian, refuted Darwin's theory.

It was these strata that Sedgwick named after a Latinized English term for the country of Wales—"Cambria," a designation that eventually replaced "Silurian" as the name for the earliest strata of animal fossils.

Darwin read Lyell's magnum opus, The Principles of Geology, on the voyage of the Beagle and employed its principles of reasoning in On the Origin of Species. The subtitle of Lyell's Principles

The term "Cambrian explosion" was to become common coin, because Walcott's site suggested the geologically abrupt appearance of a menagerie of animals as various as any found in the gaudiest science fiction. During this explosion of fauna, representatives of about twenty of the roughly twenty-seven total phyla present in the known fossil record made their first appearance on earth (see Fig. 2.5).

Despite the scope of his synthesis, there was one set of facts that troubled Darwin—something he conceded his theory couldn't adequately explain, at least at present. Darwin was puzzled by a pattern in the fossil record that seemed to document the geologically sudden appearance of animal life in a remote period of geologic history, a period that at first was commonly called the Silurian, but later came to be known as the Cambrian.

Instead, the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record, especially in light of the Burgess Shale after Walcott, points to the geologically sudden appearance of complex and novel body plans.

Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

When molten rock (magma) pushes up through the sea floor, it forces tectonic plates to spread apart, or diverge, creating valleys known as rifts.

I've started to interact with geologists around the world, scientists who've dedicated their lives to studying glaciers and ice fields, and it's tough for all of us to realize that we're studying a system in decline, the demise of the cryosphere, that frozen part of the world.

Another planet has been discovered that apparently may be made of diamonds. It is called 55 Cancri e and is about double the size of the Earth but weighs about eight times more.

The time of human domination on Earth is barely a drop in the ocean of geological time, and it takes a lot to make a ripple in that ocean.

Beneath a world—in its rocks, its dirt and sedimentary overlays—there you find the planet's memory, the complete analog of its existence, its ecological memory. —PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer

That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?

About 90 percent of the past five hundred thousand years have been colder than today, and the world's climate has been in transition from cold to warm or back again for about three quarters of that time.

A lot of these ridges formed during the ice ages," he explained. "Imagine filling all the existing valleys with ice, then sending lava flows out along the margins of those glaciers. When the flow hits the ice it hardens and creates a dam, so instead of flowing onto the glacier it continues down the ridge. When the ice age ends, the glaciers melt away and you get pretty much what you see now.

The clam had shown up 200 million years before the action really began. Virtually all the phyla that have crawled, walked, flown, or swum during the modern era arose roughly 520 million years ago in a blink of geologic time so brief it's called the "Cambrian explosion.

tooled cowboy boots, engraved hip flask and, in recognition of his new passion for geology, a nineteenth-century explorer's specimen hammer in a leather case. To bless his second adolescence on turning fifty, a trumpet that had once belonged to Guy Barker. These offerings represented only a fraction of the happiness she urged on him, and sex was only one part of that fraction, and only latterly a failure, elevated by him into a mighty injustice.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

All caves begin with rain. The rain mixes with gas. The new acidic water eats through rocks, and tiny fractures grow into passageways. Eventually—after many thousands of years—these passageways might create an opening large enough for a man.