Continental Drift Quotes

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.

We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me. The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are! We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic… asshole.

I only believe in the easy things, like red lipstick and coffee before noon and writing essays in pen. I make my mind up about boys and then I unmake it, compare us to continental drift, two ships passing. I hit the snooze button too often. Write disposable poems on napkins and old homework, try to discipline myself when it comes to removing my makeup before bed. I am trying to understand men better, cut them some slack, write about them less. I dream about oceans and mountains and wolves. I do not always love myself. I do not always forgive myself. I write apology letters and do not send them. Usually, I do not mean it when I tell someone goodbye.

Please?” asked the girl. “I AM BUSY. I AM TRYING TO FIX CONTINENTAL DRIFT.” “I…didn’t know it was broken.” Uriel’s face became more animated, his speech faster. “IT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS. I THINK IT BROKE WHEN I RELOADED NEW ZEALAND FROM A BACKUP COPY, BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHY. MY SYNCHRONIZATION WAS IMPECCABLE AND THE CHANGE PROPAGATED SIMULTANEOUSLY ACROSS ALL SEPHIROT. I THINK SOMEBODY BOILED A GOAT IN ITS MOTHER’S MILK. IT IS ALWAYS THAT. I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO DO IT, BUT NOBODY LISTENS.

Sex discrimination and hate crimes against women don't come from the leather community or its pornography. They occur within contexts like industrial capitalism and marriage that most people take for granted as if they had always existed, like gravity or continental drift. If feminism is going to change the world, it has to focus its critical lens on what most people think is normal, not on what most people think is abnormal.

Continents drift, and so do hearts.

All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs.

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.

Certain English geologists produced confusion by embracing continental drift and then drawing up narratives and maps that showed continents moving all over the earth with respect to a fixed and undriftable England.

...believes in God the way he believes in politicians-he knows He exists but doesn't count on Him for anything.

Black_Venus: Here it goes: Curious mosaic Continental drift Parabolic metaphor Elemental rift Time and transposition Conscious intermission Assertion? Desertion -- Black_Venus: That's all I have so far. You finish it. Me: How about "Spanish Inquisition.

There was a sudden silence from the combo in the smoke. One of the trolls picked up a small rock and started to pound it gently, producing a slow, sticky rhythm that clung to the walls like smoke. And from the smoke, Ruby emerged like a galleon out of the fog with a ridiculous feather boa around her neck. It was continental drift with words. She began to sing. The trolls stood in respectful silence. After a while Victor heard a sob. Tears were rolling down Rock's face. "What's the song about?" he whispered. Rock leaned down. "Is ancient folklorique troll song," he said. "Is about Amber and Jasper. They were—" he hesitated, and waved his hands about vaguely. "Friends. Good friends?" "I think I know what you mean," said Victor. "And one day Amber takes her troll’s dinner down to the cave and finds him—" Rock waved his hands in vague yet thoroughly descriptive motions "—with another lady troll. So she go home and get her club and come back and beat him to death, thump, thump, thump. ’Cos he was her troll and he done her wrong. Is very romantic song.

True heroism is not reserved solely for men and women in uniform. Heroes come from all walks of lifestyles.

People can do horrible things when faced with difficult financial decisions.

She put her hands on her hips, eyeing me. I waited. Never rush anyone who’s personally witnessed continental drift.

I had to admit, though, that I’m human enough to be glad he wasn’t going to be marrying a woman old enough to have personally witnessed continental drift.

Somewhere in these streets, plastic was invented. X-rays were discovered, continental drift was identified. What marvels does science cultivate here now?

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” from Collected Poems Jane Austen Russell Banks, Continental Drift Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader The Holy Bible Elizabeth Bishop Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Antarctica used to be a jungle. For millions of years it was as lush as Africa. But continental drift and natural climate change froze it over. All those plants died and decomposed. The gases from that decomposition—most notably methane—got trapped in the ice.

He can take it and leave it, which is a much happier condition than having to do one or the other. He’s not sure how this

It is only our limited time frame that creates the whole "natives versus exotics" controversy. Wind animals, sea currents, and continental drift have always dispersed species into new environments... The planet has been awash in surging , swarming species movement since life began. The fact that it is not one great homogeneous tangled weed lot is persuasive testimony to the fact that intact ecosystems are very difficult to invade.

Holmes laid out a continental drift theory that was in its fundamentals the theory that prevails today. It was still a radical proposition for the time and widely criticized, particularly in the United States, where resistance to drift lasted longer than elsewhere. One reviewer there fretted, without any evident sense of irony, that Holmes presented his arguments so clearly and compellingly that students might actually come to believe them. Elsewhere,

Initially, his theory was inspired by the observation that the shapes of continents like South America and Africa could be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift then became more certain as fossils accumulated and paleontologists found that the distribution of ancient species suggested that the continents were once joined. Later, “plate tectonics” was suggested as a mechanism for continental movement, just as natural selection was suggested as the mechanism for evolution:

It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don’t know “where” God is – and people sometimes ask such questions – you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother’s belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain. God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation. Now He is there, now there is less of Him, but sometimes He is not there at all, because God manifests Himself even in the fact that He is not there. People – who themselves are in fact a process – are afraid of whatever is impermanent and always changing, which is why they have invented something that doesn’t exist – invariability, and recognised that whatever is eternal and unchanging is perfect. So they have ascribed invariability to God, and that was how they lost the ability to understand Him.

The metabolic rate of history is too fast for us to observe it. It's as if, attending to the day-long life cycle of a single mayfly, we lose sight of the species and its fate. At the same time, the metabolic rate of geology is too slow for us to perceive it, so that, from birth to death, it seems to us who are caught in the beat of our own individual human hearts that everything happening on this planet is what happens to us, personally, privately, secretly. We can stand at night on a high, cold plain and look out toward the scrabbled, snow-covered mountains in the west, the same in a suburb of Denver as outside a village in Baluchistan in Pakistan, and even though beneath our feet continent-sized chunks of earth grind inexorably against one another, go on driving one or the other continent down so as to rise up and over it, as if desiring to replace it on the map, we poke with our tongue for a piece of meat caught between two back teeth and think of sarcastic remarks we should have made to our brother-in-law at dinner.

We phone each other because it's only in these long-distance calls, this groping for each other along cables of buried copper, cluttered relays, the whirling contact points of clogged selector switches, only in this probing the silence and waiting for an echo that one prolongs that first call from afar, that cry that went up when the first great crack of the continental drift yawned beneath the feet of a human couple, when the depths of the ocean opened up to separate them, while, torn precipitously apart, one on one bank and one on the other, the couple strove with their cries to stretch out a bridge of sound that might keep them together yet, cries that grew ever fainter until the roar of the waves overwhelmed all hope.

The most spectacular example of continental drift and tectonic plate movement has to be the Indian Plate, a triangle of geomorphic crust which aeons ago broke away from the single supercontinent of Gondwanaland to drift north-eastwards across the globe. As it slid so it scraped over magmatic hotspots, releasing stupendous amounts of volcanic gases and lava – a catastrophic venting that may well have contributed towards the extinction of the greater dinosaurs but most certainly created the layers of thick lava topped by granite boulders that make up much of the triangular tableland known as the Indian Plate, which the Arya (of whom I have a lot more to say in a later chapter) named the Deccan (derived from the Sanskrit dakshina, ‘south country’).

In 1953, Charles Hapgood had developed his theory of crustal displacement.  He argued that the Earth had undergone multiple displacements of land as a result of the movement of a liquid core one hundred miles underneath the surface.  Rather than the slow process of continental drift, which split lands apart, crustal displacement could move large bodies of land together and quickly.  In line with his theory, he argued that Atlantis had never truly disappeared but just moved south, where it was renamed Antarctica.  Hapgood’s theory would explain one extraordinary fact about the continent of Antarctica: evidence indicated that at one point in its history, it had a much warmer climate, free from ice.  Hapgood’s theory was scorned by a number of prominent scientists, but Dr. Hapgood had garnered at least one well-known supporter: Albert Einstein.

You get surprised by looking back and wondering when you started not allowing anyone to approach you, to decide that deep down you did not care about anything. And surprise: all you manage to remember is a chain of small troubles. No earthquake, no gigantic traumatic event, as in the movies, where a significant event explains a whole personality. No dad or mom who left home, no surprised ex-husband in bed with your best friend. Rather: trifles of children, if anything. Minutiae, something that is almost laughable. Very small movements of indifference, of continental drift, that did not really move the floor at all, but that, millimeter after millimeter, they recorded inside you the certainty that it is better not to completely support yourself, because the floor is not stable, and You must always be ready to jump before a crack in the ground opens. And only now that, for a single night, you granted yourself a truce, you let yourself go and relaxed, only now that you finally let someone come to you and - How incredible! - not only did you not die, but you liked it more than what you could imagine, only now that you realize that until this moment everything was terribly exhausting.

Years later, in a high-school biology class, Samuel heard a story about a certain kind of African turtle that swam across the ocean to lay its eggs in South America. Scientists could find no reason for the enormous trip. Why did the turtles do it? The leading theory was that they began doing eons ago, when South America and Africa were still locked together. Back then, only a river might have separated the continents, and the turtles laid their eggs on the river's far bank. But then the continents began drifting apart, and the river widened by about an inch per year, which would have been invisible to the turtles. So they kept going to the same spot, the far bank of the river, each generation swimming a tiny bit farther than the last one, and after a hundred million years of this, the river had become an ocean, and yet the turtles never noticed. This, Samuel decided, was the manner of his mother's departure. This was how she moved away - imperceptibly, slowly, bit by bit.

You know you're like, my hero, right?

A good short history of the development of the drift hypothesis and the final emergence of plate tectonics is given in A. Hallam, A Revolution in the Earth Sciences: From Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)

It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don't know 'where' God is--and people sometimes ask such questions--you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn't fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances o the sun's corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowering to the sea, seed germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother's belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain. God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation.

I think our maps contributed to a revolution in geological thinking, which is some ways compares to the Copernican revolution. Scientists and the general public got their first relatively realistic image of a vast part of the planet that they could never see. The maps received wide coverage and were widely circulated. They brought the theory of continental drift within the realm of rational speculation. You could see the worldwide mid-ocean ridge and you could see that it coincided with earthquakes. The borders of the plates took shape, leading rapidly to the more comprehensive theory of plate tectonics.

Continental Drift you have moved through like an ice flow- steady slow substantial tumble of glacial tongue sweeping through valleys reshaped you arrived on your own epic time patient and thorough meltwater firn crevasse and all lifting rocks on shifting plates smoothing edges and moving the very axes of my teeth you soothed over rifts and fault lines leaving me newly minted peaked and ridged steep and crested sloped and spurred Hillsides lush and summits glistening I rush to a new dawn but not without raw traces of your tender era scratched warmly on my every acre

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn't exist." Satan is the world’s master in the power of speech. He uses America media to keep Americans at each other throats. The American Media simply confirms that the greatest sin the devil perpetuated on mankind was convincing the world that he doesn't exist." While the American media leverage Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat to create anger and hostility…we can sneak through the back door. ~Genesis Supreme Commander

Victory comes only to those prepared to make it, and take it ~Tom Clancy

this way, we’ve changed the geometry of the planet. Before we came along, the world was discontinuous. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges formed impenetrable barriers, breaking Earth into separate regions where populations could evolve independently, and then be isolated or merged by continental drift and climate change. Now we’ve created pathways around all those borders, and to some degree the planet is one continuous habitat. Some

species. In this way, we’ve changed the geometry of the planet. Before we came along, the world was discontinuous. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges formed impenetrable barriers, breaking Earth into separate regions where populations could evolve independently, and then be isolated or merged by continental drift and climate change. Now we’ve created pathways around all those borders, and to some degree the planet is one continuous habitat. Some

Our landscapes are marked by the presence of grand trees. And what are trees, but love stories written by terra firma in praise of all the heavens offer? There are hundreds of ways to scribe your love story to reach a Sublime Result. Just ask the oak. All 600 species. III. Our own story will not be written in chronological order. Love was never meant to keep you in your comfort zone. It was designed- to feed, challenge, grow, and sustain you. To fracture you gently, drown you in small increments. Continental drift you into Pure Consciousness. And I am learning: to have the patience of geologic processes. My blood turns to lava, my breath to ash, my love to eons, to measures of time and movement imperceptible at most moments.

The social system does not and never can exist which allows no harm to come to anybody. Conflict of impulse and desire is an inescapable fact of human existence, and where there is conflict there will always be losers and wounds. Utopian systems premised on a world of loving harmony—communism, for instance—fail because in the attempt to obliterate conflict they obliterate freedom. The chore of a social regime is not to obliterate conflict but to manage it, so as to put it to good use while causing a minimum of hurt and abuse. Liberal systems, although far from perfect, have at least two great advantages: they can channel conflict rather than obliterate it, and they give a certain degree of protection from centrally administered abuse. The liberal intellectual system is no exception. It causes pain to people whose views are criticized, still more to those whose views fail to check out and so are rejected. But there are two important consolations. First, no one gets to run the system to his own advantage or stay in charge for long. Whatever you can do to me, I can do to you. Those who are criticized may give as good as they get. Second, the books are never closed, and the game is never over. Sometimes rejected ideas (continental drift, for one) make sensational comebacks.

Homesickness, the little elastic band in the subconscious that can wind up a salmon and propel it three thousand miles through strange seas, or send a million lemmings running joyfully back to an ancestral homeland which, owing to a slight kink in the continental drift, isn’t there any more – homesickness rose up inside Rincewind like a late-night prawn biriani,

Lady Ramkin drawing herself up haughtily was not a sight to forget, although you could try. It was like watching continental drift in reverse as various subcontinents and islands pulled themselves together to form one massive, angry protowoman.

it is we who live for the dead and not the dead who live for us.

For many geologists, the most important consequence of the recognition of plate tectonics was that it brought confirmation of continental drift. As important, plate tectonics allowed continental drift to be determined with considerable precision. This became immediately clear to Clark Burchfiel, now at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who in 1968 had carried out fieldwork in Yugoslavia, and returned home to discover Le Pichon’s paper. By knowing the relative motions between Africa and North America and between Europe and North America, Le Pichon had predicted the motion between Africa and Europe for the previous 80 million years, a history that included not only the present-day convergence between Africa and Europe, but also periods when these two regions moved in different directions relative to one another, including a period when they diverged from one another. This history of relative plate motion wrote a complex history on the rock record of the region affected by the relative movement of Africa and Europe. Nevertheless, Burchfiel had inferred from the geologic history of this rock the times of major changes and had inferred what tectonic processes (convergence, divergence, and directions of relative movement) might be occurring at these times. Le Pichon’s calculated plate motions, from data solely in the Atlantic Ocean, predicted many of Burchfiel’s observations and inferences. A new idea becomes believable when it predicts something that has not yet been measured or explained, especially when the idea is really trying to explain other facts.

It’s the world,” he said patiently. “Of course it will bloody well work. I mean, look at it. Hurricanes, continental drift, rainfall cycle—it’s all there. All ticking over like a bloody watch. It’ll last you a lifetime, a world like that. Used carefully.

Studies of the configuration of the coastlines on either side of the Atlantic led the sixteenth-century Flemish geographer Abraham Ortelius to propose that the continents might have drifted apart – an idea about “continental drift” that only came to be widely accepted in the latter part of the twentieth century.

America…you once hung and burned women as witches and people because of their skin color. How dare you cry ‘Bring us your poor and weary.’ You are not offering freedom…you are asking for redemption. Today we do not have any. We will bring the war to you at the Achilles Arc in the Puerto Rico Trench. ~Genesis High Commander Mustafa