Quotes About Sediment

It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.

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

What we understand by the concept of institution are those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history--or again those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a sequel, the necessity of a future.

Consider carbon, for example. The lifetime of carbon in the combined atmosphere-ocean-biosphere, the time it takes on average before the typical carbon atom is transferred to the sediment, is less than 200,000 years.

Cultures of the fungus Penicillium have also been grown from sediment sampled 127 meters below the floor of the Pacific Ocean.15 This is a mystifying discovery, because we have no idea what a filamentous fungus is doing down there with no oxygen and so little to eat.