Quotes About Geology

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.

There is good evidence that Venus once had liquid water and a much thinner atmosphere, similar to Earth billions of years ago. But today the surface of Venus is dry as a bone, hot enough to melt lead, there are clouds of sulfuric acid that reach a hundred miles high and the air is so thick it's like being 900 meters deep in the ocean.

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time.

I've been collecting rocks since I was 8 and have over 200 different specimens.

I majored in geology in college but have majored in Herbert Hoover ever since.

America forms the longest and straightest bone in the earth's skeleton.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.)

The fact is, we are still very much in an ice age; it's just a somewhat shrunken one—though less shrunken than many people realize. At the height of the last period of glaciation, around twenty thousand years ago, about 30 percent of the Earth's land surface was under ice.

As we sit here, continents are adrift, like leaves on a pond. GPS tracking shows North America & Europe currently moving apart at the same rate your fingernail grows, or about two yards in a human lifetime.

For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age—ice epoch really—started about forty million years ago, and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all.

the mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was—mostly—under water.

The process became known as sea-floor spreading. When the crust reached the end of its journey at the boundary with continents, it plunged back into the Earth in a process known as subduction.

ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a puzzle because continental rocks were often billions of years old.

Karl Schimper, was actually the first to coin the term "ice age

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.

This is a point known to geology as the KT boundary1 and it marks the time, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and roughly half the world's other species of animals abruptly vanish from the fossil record.

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.

a Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovi?i? was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary between the crust and the layer immediately below, the mantle; this zone has been known ever since as the Mohorovi?i? discontinuity, or Moho for short.

remote in time from us the Cambrian outburst was. If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. It was, in other words, an extremely long time ago and the world was a very different

published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. Today