Quotes About Geology

A butte is taller than it is wide, whereas a mesa, like this one, is wider than it is tall.

The supercontinent Pangaea split in the Mesozoic era into the continents we see today, and resulted in extensive land movement over time.

Stalagmite: a calcium carbonate deposit shaped like an icicle and formed by the dripping of percolating calcareous water … Stalagmite: dripping of percolating calcareous …

Stalactites and stalagmites.

The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.

By this technique of measuring, the oldest Earth rocks found so far date only to 3.5 billion years ago. The Moon missions returned some 900 pounds of rocks and soil samples. From these, a curious factoid was ultimately revealed in 1973: some of the Moon rocks dated back to 5.3 billion years ago. Thus, between

Volcanoes can be Active, Dormant, or Extinct.

Geological age plays the same part in our views of the duration of the universe as the Earth's orbital radius does in our views of the immensity of space.

The reason you see so many volcanoes on Venus is partly due to the fact that there's virtually no erosion there. So on Venus, you're seeing features, some of which are hundreds of millions of years old on the surface. On Earth, we do not see any surface features nearly that old - you only see much more recent features.

You can remember which one is which by thinking that stalactites cling tight to the ceiling, while stalagmites might rise up from the floor. Over time, the stalagmites and stalactites will meet and form a column, just like they did with old Cupid here.

The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events.

The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.

The home terms still apply. The enthusiasm geologists show for adding new words to their conversation is, if anything, exceeded by their affection for the old. They are not about to drop granite. They say granodiorite when they are in church and granite the rest of the week.

If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away . . . continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden of fireflies.

There are dark, hard, cherty silt-stones from some deep ocean trench full of rapidly accumulating Pennsylvanian guck.

lithosphere

Pre-Cambrian Memory.

Geologists claim that although the world is running out of oil, there is still a 200-hundred-year supply of brake fluid.

Attached to the survey was William Phipps Blake, a young geologist from a prominent Eastern family. Blake's party failed to discern a suitable railroad route, but he did stumble upon a remarkable geologic feature in the trackless desert.

I was teaching introductory geology at Caltech for the first time. I'm not a geologist. I've never taken a single class in geology. If you gave me a handful of different types of rocks, chances are I could identify only a small number of them. I still get confused by the meanings of strike and dip. Luckily, most of my students didn't realize this.

To doubt that life evolved, even if some of the details described in this book may yet prove wrong, is to doubt the convergence of evidence, from molecules to men, from bacteria to planetary systems. It is to doubt the evidence of biology, and its concordance with physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy. It is to doubt the veracity of experiment and observation, to doubt the testing in reality. It is, in the end, to doubt reality.

Cambrian period, some 550 million years ago, soon after a big global rise in atmospheric oxygen.

The record of rocks is a script containing stored memories of earth's past.

Montana may never be considered the epicenter of modern life, but about 65 to 70 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, it was a happening place.)