Geology Humor Quotes

Schist," said an angry voice from the grass. Hazel raised her eyebrows. "Excuse me?" "Schist! Big pile of schist!

That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?

After a geological epoch passed in which single-celled organisms evolved into talk show hosts, Mr. Coffee was still holding out on me.

Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think. Also, I subscribed to a number of learned journals.

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.

Then Dad started going on about the complex geological formations in this part of the coast until Mum told him to shut up. But she was smiling when she said it. Lucy liked that.

History, Geology, Psychology, Philosophy, Chemistry, Physics, Theology, Mathematics, Technology, Sociology, Biology, and the list goes on and on. If all this body of knowledge exist for human consumption, why would I specialize in only one field?

As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus.

A humorous treatment of the rigid uniformitarian view came from Mark Twain. Although the shortening of the Mississippi River he referred to was the result of engineering projects eliminating many of the bends in the river, it is a thought-provoking spoof: The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. . . . Its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present. Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past . . . what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! . . . In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

So Dan Miller decided to roast a pig. The idea took hold of him after another eruption on August 7. He would roast a pig in the steaming volcano fields at the base of St. Helens. Being a scientist meant that he would do it in a methodical fashion: notes would be kept and he would document everything. The operation needed a cover name because reporters and others were monitoring all radio communication around the volcano, so he called it the 'FPP temperature experiment'. FPP stood for Front Page Palmer, a name the scientists had given a local geology professor who had irritated the Survey geologists by grandstanding for the press. Miller would roast a pig and Palmer at the same time.

W turned on his heel and began walking toward the door at the far wall. And by walking I mean, of course, not moving at all, at least not to the naked eye, because his strides could only be measured in micrometers. His creaky legs made barely the tiniest of forward steps, so he’d taken four strides before I noticed any lateral movement at all. “I'll be right back.” “Geologically speaking, of course,” HARV said.

It is believed that One Tree Island was created during a particularly vicious storm that occurred some four thousand years ago. (As one geologist who has studied the place put it to me, “You wouldn’t have wanted to be there when that happened.”)

I've got a one-way ticket out of this geological era burning a hole in my pocket, but, of course, there's a problem on the subway.

Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think," said Splod. "Also, I subscribe to a number of learned journals.

Picking a fight with a species as widespread, long-lived, irascible and — when it suited them — single-minded as the Dwellers too often meant that just when — or even geological ages after when — you thought that the dust had long since settled, bygones were bygones and any unfortunate disputes were all ancient history, a small planet appeared without warning in your home system, accompanied by a fleet of moons, themselves surrounded with multitudes of asteroid-sized chunks, each of those riding cocooned in a fuzzy shell made up of untold numbers of decently hefty rocks, every one of them travelling surrounded by a large landslide’s worth of still smaller rocks and pebbles, the whole ghastly collection travelling at so close to the speed of light that the amount of warning even an especially wary and observant species would have generally amounted to just about sufficient time to gasp the local equivalent of “What the fu—?” before they disappeared in an impressive if wasteful blaze of radiation.

Orogeny is a geological term for the building of a mountain range from subduction or collision of tectonic plates, although disappointingly the adjectival form is 'orogenic' not 'orogenous'.

Man himself is so buffeted by shifts of thought and mood, not knowing from one day to the next what he truly feels, that a shifting earth is well-nigh the last straw.

Geochemists said the 'shocked quartz' was not really shocked at all - not even mildly surprised.