Quotes About Geology

Most plates move relatively slowly—the North American Plate, for example, is shifting westward at about twenty millimeters a year, somewhat less than the rate at which human fingernails grow. The Pacific Plate is, by contrast, something of a speed demon: it moves ten times as rapidly, and in a habitual northwesterly direction, covering something like two centimeters each year.

With geology—a knowledge-based account of the nature of planet Earth, which one might legitimately regard as the ur-science—now unleashed from churchly teaching, other kinds of rational thinking started to seep into and infect all the other realms of natural philosophy. Science in its most general sense took off as a legitimate field of study and challenge, and the free-thinking rationality and free will that is the

All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.

Mamo, the Italian word for marble, comes from the Greek marmairein, meaning "to shine". Geologically speaking, marble is limestone transformed by the heat and pressure of the earth's crust into a medium-hard, crystalline rock. Cold to the touch, marble yields willingly to the sculptor's chisel. Over time, white statuary acquires an ivory patina remarkably evocative of the warmth of human flesh.

solid rock and it took immense amounts of heat, pressure and time to make it act like liquid chocolate. Gneiss is a high-grade metamorphic rock, which means that it formed under conditions of extreme heat and/or pressure.

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant.

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant, §

Geologic time includes now.

Dr. Osgood began at once to chip out another fossil. This time it was a fern, an important find. The fern told him how old the cave was.

If you were back in the Cretaceous Period - the last of the time of the dinosaurs - and you were driving from New York to Philadelphia on the New Jersey Turnpike, you would be driving across water.

Nothing perhaps has so retarded the reception of the higher conclusions of Geology among men in general, as ... [the] instinctive parsimony of the human mind in matters where time is concerned.

I paint a mountain - I think of its age - the strata formations or what grows on the mountain.

Geological time is not money.

James Hutton, peering at the fine detail of geological stratigraphy, newly exposed by eighteenth century industrial works. Realizing a simple story was illusory, he instead inferred a world in which 'we find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end'.

The earth was initially very hot and without an atmosphere. In the course of time it cooled and acquired an atmosphere from the emission of gases from the rocks.

The earth was initially very hot and without an atmosphere.

in about 5600 BC the Mount Mazama volcano in Oregon erupted, raining rock and burning ash for years, and leading to the many years of rainfall that eventually filled the volcanic crater today called Crater Lake.

Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

La geología había perdido una piedra y la sociedad había ganado un hombre.

Agur -murmuró Celipín, poniéndose en marcha. Desapareció entre las sombras de la noche. La geología había perdido una piedra y la sociedad había ganado un hombre.

The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.

Hapgood's theory of earth-crust displacement

the ice-cap had spread from centres near Hudson Bay to enshroud all of eastern Canada, New England and much of the Midwest down to the 37th parallel – well to the south of Cincinnati in the Mississippi Valley and more than halfway to the equator.41

the principle known as "uniformitarianism." This is the assumption that existing processes, acting as at present, are sufficient to account for all geological changes.