84 Quotes About Geology

Kramer's recognition, with the geologists Lees and Falcon, that people could have settled in the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers much earlier than had previously been assumed has been entirely vindicated by subsequent discoveries of the traces of 'primitive agricultural villages' dating back more than 8000 years.

Thomas Crowley and Gerald North, oceanographers at Texas A&M University, describe the melting of the great ice-sheets at the end of the last Ice Age as 'one of the most rapid and extreme examples of climate change recorded in the geologic record'.

Altogether, according to John McPhee, [geological ages] number in the „tens of dozens.” Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any of them again.

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

The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of dirty paint daubed on the stone.

When I break a rock open with my pick, I'm a prophet. I see the past. I see the future. I know where the world is going, and where it's been. And I always, always want to know more.

Each volcano is an independent machine—nay, each vent and monticule is for the time being engaged in its own peculiar business, cooking as it were its special dish, which in due time is to be separately served. We have instances of vents within hailing distance of each other pouring out totally different kinds of lava, neither sympathizing with the other in any discernible manner nor influencing other in any appreciable degree.

To trace the series of these revolutions, to explain their causes, and thus to connect together all the indications of change that are found in the mineral kingdom, is the proper object of a THEORY OF THE EARTH.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.