Cool Geology Quotes

A newly formed planet appeared on the large screen. its surface was till red-hot, like a piece of charcoal fresh out of the furnace. Time passed at the rate of geological eras, and the planet gradually cooled. The color and patterns on the surface slowly shifted in a hypnotic manner. A few minutes later, an orange planet appeared on the screen, indicating the end of the simulation run. "The computations were done at the coarsest level; to do it with more precision would require over a month." Green Glasses moved the mouse and zoomed in on the surface of the planet. The view swept over a broad desert, over a cluster of strangely shaped, towering mountain peaks, over a circular depression like an impact crater. "What are we looking at?" Yang Dong asked. "Earth. Without life, this is what the surface of the planet would look like now." "But . . . where are the oceans?" "There are no oceans. No rivers either. The entire surface is dry." "Your'e saying that without life, liquid water would not exist on Earth?" "The reality would probably be even more shocking. Remember, this is only a coarse simulation, but at least you can see how much of an impact life had in the present state of the Earth." "But--" "Do you think life is nothing but a fragile, thin, soft shell clinging to the surface of this planet?" "Isn't it?" "Only if you neglect the power of time. If a colony of ants continue to move clods the size of grains of rice, they could remove all of Mount Tai in a billion years. As long as you give it enough time, life is stronger than metal and stone, more powerful than typhoons and volcanoes.

The cave was cool and silent- thoroughly carpeted- with the most luxuriant mantle of mosses Alma Whittaker had ever seen. The cave was not merely mossy; it throbbed with moss. It was not merely green; it was frantically green. It was so bright in its verdure that the color nearly spoke, as though- smashing through the world of sight- it wanted to migrate into the world of sound. The moss was a thick, living pelt, transforming every rock surface into a mythical, sleeping beast. Improbably, the deepest corners of the cave glittered the brightest; they were absolutely studded, Alma realized with a gasp, with the jewellike filigree of 'Schistotega pennata.' Goblin's gold, dragon's gold, elfin gold- 'Schistotega pennata' was that rarest of cave mosses, that false gem that gleams like a cat's eye from within the permanent twilight of geologic shade, that unearthly sparkling plant that needs but the briefest sliver of light each day to sparkle like glory forever, that brilliant trickster whose shining facets have fooled so many travelers over the centuries into believing that they have stumbled upon hidden treasure. But to Alma, this 'was' treasure, more stunning than actual riches, for it bedecked the entire cave in the uncanny, glistering, emerald light that she had only ever before seen in miniature, in glimpses of moss seen through a microscope... yet now she was standing fully within it.

Burrator Reservoir, in south-west England’s Dartmoor National Park, is a good place to start. My university department takes its new geology students to this spot every autumn to give them their first taste of intrusive volcanic rocks – rocks formed when molten magma flows through the Earth’s cool upper crust slowly enough to solidify before it breaks through to the surface. The uplands of Dartmoor exist only because the resulting granite, deposited near the beginning of the Permian Period 290 million years ago, is more resistant to erosion than the softer rocks of the surrounding, low-lying countryside. Our students first see the granite in a small abandoned quarry, just south of Burrator Reservoir, and this location illustrates nicely many crucial components of the Earth’s climate system. The geological processes operating in this area act like a thermostatically controlled air conditioning system and, together with similar processes occurring in many places across the world, help keep temperatures on our planet roughly constant and, hence, suitable for life.

Life is a common good, it inheres in man and beast and passes from one to another, from body to body, this is how souls travel. In nature, everything is constantly changing, nothing is lost. The soul, that is, what constitutes life, is like wax: it retains its identity but only changes shape and constantly appears as new individuals. This is the nature of being: nothing in the world remains in one state, everything flows, every phenomenon is in progress, time itself moves steadily, like a river. Night turns into day, day into night, the moon has different phases, the year has different seasons. Nor will our bodies remain tomorrow what they are today or what they were yesterday. How many changes does a person undergo in the course of life, from fetus through infancy, crawling, maturity, aging, and unto death! And the whole universe. According to theory of the four elements, everything that exists arises from these very basic elements, and everything then turns into building material. “To be born”means “to begin to be something else.”“To die”means “to stop being what you used to be.”The ingredients are interchangeable, but matter remains the same. What does geology prove? Eternal transformations of the earth. There were seas, and now there are no seas; there were mountains and they have vanished; rivers flowed and dried up; volcanoes erupted and cooled. And that’s just the inanimate nature for you! The law of change in the animal world is even clearer. Caterpillars turn into butterflies, tadpoles into frogs, larvae into bees. Human societies and states are governed by the same principle. Troy has fallen, Pythagoras said to Numa Pompilius, and it is from that fall, thanks to Aeneas, the progenitor of the Julian house, that the Roman Empire will be reborn. It will be very powerful. Pythagoras did not say what would happen to Rome next. After all, everything changes? Yes, everything changes, the golden age has passed, the iron age has come. Therefore, I tell you, do not eat meat, concluded Pythagoras. And Numa Pompilius, having heard his teachings, came to Rome, instituted civilization there, and instructed a nation of warriors in the ways of peaceful coexistence.

The girls, their feet in the cold water, utter cries like a seagull's. Moreover, they are immediately transformed into seagulls, and these in turn into the obscure object of desire, swaying and waddling like the ostrich at the end of Buñuel's film. The summer has arrived. I was very anxious she might be disappointed and I could never have forgiven her for that. I shall never forgive anyone who passes a condescending or contemptuous judgement on America. They are at the centre of the world and they don't know it. What they prefer is to be at the centre of books and the earth. Only sequoias have the heroic, fabulous, antediluvian stature of the first days of the world, being contemporary with the great prehistoric animals. And indeed their scaley bark resembles a carapace. They are the only trees on a par with the geological and mineral scenario of the deserts. After them it is the little species that have triumphed.

In the early 1900s a Serbian scientist named Milutin Milanković studied the Earth’s position relative to other planets and came up with the theory of ice ages that we now know is accurate: The gravitational pull of the sun and moon gently affect the Earth’s motion and tilt toward the sun. During parts of this cycle—which can last tens of thousands of years—each of the Earth’s hemispheres gets a little more, or a little less, solar radiation than they’re used to. And that is where the fun begins. Milanković’s theory initially assumed that a tilt of the Earth’s hemispheres caused ravenous winters cold enough to turn the planet into ice. But a Russian meteorologist named Wladimir Köppen dug deeper into Milanković’s work and discovered a fascinating nuance. Moderately cool summers, not cold winters, were the icy culprit. It begins when a summer never gets warm enough to melt the previous winter’s snow. The leftover ice base makes it easier for snow to accumulate the following winter, which increases the odds of snow sticking around in the following summer, which attracts even more accumulation the following winter. Perpetual snow reflects more of the sun’s rays, which exacerbates cooling, which brings more snowfall, and on and on. Within a few hundred years a seasonal snowpack grows into a continental ice sheet, and you’re off to the races. The same thing happens in reverse. An orbital tilt letting more sunlight in melts more of the winter snowpack, which reflects less light the following years, which increases temperatures, which prevents more snow the next year, and so on. That’s the cycle. The amazing thing here is how big something can grow from a relatively small change in conditions. You start with a thin layer of snow left over from a cool summer that no one would think anything of and then, in a geological blink of an eye, the entire Earth is covered in miles-thick ice.