Plate Tectonic Quotes

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.

According to all the experts, it's time for me to talk about what I'm going through... I can't. I'd need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.

Tectonic plates are shifting beneath my skin and there's a new continent in my chest that I want to call by your name

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.

We are both wounded in our own way and, like a pair of tectonic plates shifting over time, our wounds will gradually grate against one another’s, causing damage at a glacial pace. Neither of us will notice until it’s too late.

For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.

Diamonds are held under tons and tons of pressure, extremely high temperatures of fire and shuffled under shifting of tectonic plates, for a long, long time! Yet when they come out from there and are put on display for their beauty; does anybody stop to evaluate the diamond based upon all the shit it's been through and say "Remember that disgusting hole it used to be in? I bet it was hell in there!" No, people don't remember where a diamond has come from; they just see the beauty of it now. But it wouldn't have become so beautiful, you know, if not for all of that! So why should we look at other people, or at ourselves and evaluate them/ourselves based upon their/our pasts? Shouldn't we forget that? And only see the beauty that is in front of our eyes? Whatever it was, it made you beautiful! And that is what matters!

That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it”. For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She’d seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains. What she’d seen in that flash wasn’t even a “mountain”. It wasn’t a natural resource. It had no name. “That’s the big goal”, she said. “To find a cure for knowledge”. For education. For living in our heads. Ever since the story of Adam and Eve in the bible, humanity had been a little too smart for its own good, the Mommy said. Ever since eating that apple. Her goal was to find, if not a cure, then at least a treatment that would give people back their innocence. “The cerebral cortex, the cerebellum”, she said, “that’s where your problem is”. If she could just get down to using only her brain stem, she’d be cured. This would be somewhere beyond happiness and sadness. You don’t see fish agonized by wild mood swings. Sponges never have a bad day.

But in truth, the world is constantly shifting: shape and size, location in space. It's got edges and chasms, too many to count. They open up, close, reappear somewhere else. Geologists nay have mapped out the planet's tectonic plates -hidden shelves of rock that grind, one against the other, forming mountains, creating continents - but thy can't plot the fault lines that run through our heads, divide out hearts. The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole

In grandiose moments, high on fresh air and freedom on the hill, I study my personal geology. My body is a continent. Forces are at work in the night. A bruxist, I grind my teeth in my sleep, like tectonic plates. When I blink the sun flickers, my breath pushes the clouds across the sky and the waves roll into the shore in time with my beating heart. Lightning strikes every time I sneeze, and when I orgasm, there's an earthquake. The islands' headlands rise above the sea, like my limbs in the bathtub, my freckles are famous landmarks and my tears rivers. My lovers are tectonic plates and stone cathedrals.

I can't. I'd need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.

Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.

Hawke’s thick black unibrow scrunched in the middle as the two sides of his forehead collided in a curious display of plate tectonics.

Funny how I always thought the world would dilate and then snap back with a loud bang the day a boy happened to me. But there was no explosion, no fireworks, no sudden shift in the tectonic plates of the earth. It was more of a Zen moment - Quiet. Everything was instantly quiet. The world, my mind, the flux of time - all still. And in the middle of it was him.

You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.

How am I?" [...] "Sometimes it's a rush, like skydiving and other times it's just a smooth ride, like floating in the middle of a calm lake. It's like standing next to a hot fire that's shooting sparks, or walking on the sun and then rolling in the snow. It's like plate tectonics and hailstorms and lighting and earthquakes and hurricane-force winds all happening at once but then everything suddenly stops moving and your mind draws a blank and everything's really peaceful. It's like your mind explodes and all that's left inside your body is heat.

From the standpoint of the world’s biota, global travel represents a radically new phenomenon and, at the same time, a replay of the very old. The drifting apart of the continents that Wegener deduced from the fossil record is now being reversed—another way in which humans are running geologic history backward and at high speed. Think of it as a souped-up version of plate tectonics, minus the plates. By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

I believe the truth of how we become who we are is layered. Not like onions, but like earth. Traceable at the surface, but tumultuous beneath. Tectonic plates of our pasts shifting violently, or more often subtly, causing great rumbling disruptions in the identities we think we’ve mapped so well.

As life speeds up & the political becomes ever more personal democracy continues to foster change as fast as the movement of tectonic plates

I'd need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.

When and if Violet ever fell in love, lightning would split the heavens, tectonic plates would shift, continents would reorder themselves. Because she might be willful and spoiled and impetuous, but no one loved with the force of his sister. Her love story would be epic.

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.

At school, he enacted a major piece of treachery against his parents. His right hand was Evil Dad, and his left was Righteous Mom. Evil Dad blustered and theorized and dished out pompous bullshit. Righteous Mom complained and accused. In Righteous Mom's cosmology, Evil Dad was the sole source of hemmoroids, kleptomania, global conflict, bad breath, tectonic-plate fault lines, and clogged drains, as well as every migraine headache and menstrual cramp Righteous Mom had ever suffered.

Although today we consider earthquakes a dreaded danger to life, research reveals a synergistic relationship between Earth’s life and Earth’s movable crust. Life needs plate tectonics to persist; and plate tectonic activity needs life to persist. It especially needs photosynthetic life. (The metabolic rates exhibited by photosynthetic life are orders of magnitude greater than those in nonphotosynthetic primary organisms.) This interdependence between photosynthetic life and plate tectonics was first recognized in 2006.

My life is never stable. It’ as if I balance on a series of tectonic plates like the ones under the Pacific Ring of Fire.

there are between life partners sliding layers of history, tectonic plates of it shifting over the decades together.

A tectonic plate's got to do what a tectonic plate's got to do.

Our lives slid together like tectonic plates, ever so infinitesimally, until we couldn't picture them apart.

The two of you stood there, side by side, and the tectonic plates of your lives began to shift and resettle, continents separating.

published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn’t believe in plate tectonics. Today

It’s all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation … is easy, is quick. There’s also a universe, apparently. But I cannot bear to see the stars, even though I know they’re there all right, and I do see them, because Tod looks upward at night, as everybody does, and coos and points. The Plough. Sirius, the dog. The stars, to me, are like pins and needles, are like the routemap of a nightmare. Don’t join the dots.… Of the stars, one alone can I contemplate without pain. And that’s a planet. The planet they call the evening star, the morning star. Intense Venus.

How much Does your tongue have to bleed Before you stop biting it? Your heart is not a lion, So why are you taming it? God gave you a loud voice, A voice box dripping revolution, So quit trying to lower your volume. You were meant To rattle the tectonic plates Of anyone who has ever told you That you’re not enough. You were born fiery Don’t let anyone put out your flame With their tears of incompetence.

As we sit here, continents are adrift, like leaves on a pond. GPS tracking shows North America & Europe currently moving apart at the same rate your fingernail grows, or about two yards in a human lifetime.

Trichloroethane. All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge... For one flash, mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She'd seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She'd seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains. What shed seen wasn't even a "mountain." It wasn't a natural resource. It had no name. "that's the big goal. To find a cure for knowledge.

You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it’s like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.

Europe and Asia have no waters separating them, and thus should be a single continent. But they are separate, for social and political reasons, and not because tectonic plates said so. Perhaps ancient Greeks wanted nothing to do with the odd-looking Asians.

It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.

You can’t swear revenge on a tectonic plate.

She wasn’t that smart after all. Susanna, of all people, should have realized how those great upheavals can crack bedrock, shift tectonic plates, transform the landscape beyond recognition.

She left our Gdańsk-Morena apartment with same haste as Tata, gone in a mad dash. She must have prepared for it , trained hard and practised. Everything that fast is slow in planning. An earthquake that takes seconds to wreck everything is a result of billions of years of slipping and shoving of tectonic plates. Those plates have no choice but to live side by side, often on top of one another. They hate this setup. They push each other around, siblings vying for the top bunk, to the point of eruption, ruin and exhaustion. After the quake: calm. A sad empty calm, with too much time to think...

Apart from much else, our lively interior created the outgassing that helped to build an atmosphere and provided us with the magnetic field that shields us from cosmic radiation. It also gave us plate tectonics, which continually renews and rumples the surface. If Earth were perfectly smooth, it would be covered everywhere with water to a depth of four kilometers. There might be life in that lonesome ocean, but there certainly wouldn’t be baseball.

We are both wounded in our own way and, like a pair of tectonic plates shifting over time, our wounds will gradually grate against one another’s, causing damage at a glacial pace. Neither one of us will notice until it’s too late.

Believe me, this planet has put up with much worse than us. It’s been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, solar flares, sun-spots, magnetic storms, pole reversals, planetary floods, worldwide fires, tidal waves, wind and water erosion, cosmic rays, ice ages, and hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets, asteroids, and meteors. And people think a few plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?” ~ George Carlin, American Comedian

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:

Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink. There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo

1915 an earthquake killed 30,000 people in Avezzano, Italy, in less than a minute. The worst-hit areas had a mortality rate of 96 percent. The rich were killed along with the poor, and virtually everyone who survived was immediately thrust into the most basic struggle for survival: they needed food, they needed water, they needed shelter, and they needed to rescue the living and bury the dead. In that sense, plate tectonics under the town of Avezzano managed to re-create the communal conditions of our evolutionary past quite well. “An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain,” one of the survivors wrote. “The equality of all men.

You will notice that participants in disasters typically locate the "beginning" of the disaster at a point suggesting their own control over events. A plane crash retold will not begin with the pressure system over the Central Pacific that caused the instability over the Gulf that caused the wind shear at DFW but at some manageable human intersect, with for example the "funny feeling" ignored at breakfast. An account of a 6.8 earthquake will begin not at the overlap of the tectonic plates but more comfortably, at the place in London where we ordered the Spode that shattered the morning the tectonic plates shifted. Had we just gone with the funny feeling. Had we just never ordered the Spode. We all prefer the magical explanation. (page 15)

One of the more extreme claims of the Gaia camp, at present neither proven nor refuted, is that the influence of life over the eons has helped Earth hold on to her life-giving water, while Venus and Mars, lifeless through most of their existence, lost theirs. If so, then life may indeed be responsible for Earth’s plate tectonics. One of the original architects of plate tectonic theory, Norm Sleep from Stanford, has become thoroughly convinced that life is deeply implicated in the overall physical dynamics of Earth, including the “nonliving” interior domain. In describing the cumulative, long-term influence of life on geology, continent building, and plate tectonics, he wrote, “The net effect is Gaian. That is, life has modified Earth to its advantage.”6

Chaos was the fuel of Israel. It was a country built on shifting tectonic plates. Things were constantly colliding. Everything led to the edge, the next moment of rupture, but life became most vivid at moments of danger. It was why people drove so fast and so close. It was why they didn’t wait in lines at the airport. It was why the cafés throbbed in the mornings. It was why the markets were so loud and raw. People were chaotic in unison. Molecular in their turmoil. But it worked. Even the polar opposites were attracted to one another. Occasionally they would bash together and it made the ground pulse. There was left and there was right, and there was Orthodox and secular, and there was Arab and Jew, and there was gay and straight, there was high-tech and hippie, and there was rich and fiercely poor. Israel was a condensed everywhere. A tiny country bursting at the seams, but they were in this together. Every dream and neurosis under the sun. The psychoses. The passivities. The pretensions. The pride. The electricity of it all. And the fear too. Everyone wore a loud armor. Always in search of a debate over who and what and where they were.

By the way, what presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, on the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate) might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance!

Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, absorb infrared energy and help warm the planet. So they're absolutely crucial. The problem is that their concentration in the atmosphere needs to be regulated as the sun slowly brightens. Otherwise, the Earth would not be able to stabilize its surface temperature, which would be disastrous. Plate tectonics cycles fragments of the Earth's crust -- including limestone, which is made up of calcium, carbon dioxide, and oxygen atoms -- down into the mantle. There, the planet's internal heat releases the carbon dioxide, which is then continually vented to the atmosphere through volcanoes. It's quite an elaborate process, but the end result is a kind of thermostat that keeps the greenhouse gases in balance and our surface temperature under control. --Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D. (astronomer & physicist)

The thing about marriages, bad ones especially, is the utter disregard with which the couple and those around them treat the cracks when they first emerge. Like tectonic plates that crush and grind against each other under the surface of the earth, the damage does not happen on one sunny morning when the earthquake hits. When a couple splits, it is the result of an inevitable break that has been brewing for years without respite.

We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish

Gmorning. Outside, the wind roars, tectonic plates shift, the trains race But INSIDE YOURSELF, your mind is your own, and you’re the only one who can reach the lights, the remote, and the thermostat. Settings how you need them. Make yourself at home. Gnight. Outside, the rain falls, the sea rises, the fires burn But INSIDE YOURSELF, your mind is your own, you’re drawing the blinds, you’re the only one who can reach the lights, the remote, and the thermostat. Make yourself at home.

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has. When it arrives we receive it without too much surprise, for no one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life—sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans—tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we’ve learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke, and sometimes fate.

Lucille had never seen mountains before, and it was increasingly hard for her not to gape over the steering wheel. There was a weird poetry to it, how the usual nail salons and Dress Barns and Save-A-Lots still existed despite the evidence of actual smashed tectonic plates behind them. There was a bite in the air she didn't associate with summer; summer meant mosquitos by the lake and trying to breathe through the pea-soup humidity. Not purple mountain majesty with a side of CHECK CASHING DELUX.

Amma closes the window, walks back, re-spreads herself languorously over the sofa, convince me why feminism getting a new lease of life isn’t a good thing, Dominique? isn’t it just what the doctor ordered? actually it’s the commodification of it that bugs me, Amma, once upon a time feminists were so vilified by the media it turned generations of women away from their own liberation because nobody wanted to be denounced as one, now they’re in a lovefest with it, have you seen all these glamorous photoshoots of stunning young feministas with their funky clothes and big attitude – until it’s no longer on trend feminism needs tectonic plates to shift, not a trendy make-over

It is especially true of the seven decades that have elapsed since the end of World War Two. During this period humankind has for the first time faced the possibility of complete self-annihilation and has experienced a fair number of actual wars and genocides. Yet these decades were also the most peaceful era in human history – and by a wide margin. This is surprising because these very same decades experienced more economic, social and political change than any previous era. The tectonic plates of history are moving at a frantic pace, but the volcanoes are mostly silent. The new elastic order seems to be able to contain and even initiate radical structural changes without collapsing into violent conflict.3

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’).

Each scenario is about fifteen million years into the future, and each assumes that the Pacific Plate will continue to move northwest at about 2.0 inches per year relative to the interior of North America. In scenario 1, the San Andreas fault is the sole locus of motion. Baja California and coastal California shear away from the rest of the continent to form a long, skinny island. A short ferry ride across the San Andreas Strait connects LA to San Francisco. In scenario 2, all of California west of the Sierra Nevada, together with Baja California, shears away to the northwest. The Gulf of California becomes the Reno Sea, which divides California from Nevada. The scene is reminiscent of how the Arabian Peninsula split from Africa to open the Red Sea some 5 million years ago. In scenario 3, central Nevada splits open through the middle of the Basin and Range province. The widening Gulf of Nevada divides the continent form a large island composed of Washington, Oregon, California, Baja California, and western Nevada. The scene is akin to Madagascar’s origin when it split form eastern Africa to open the Mozambique Channel.

I remember feeling like the earth's tectonic plates were shifting -- as if I could feel it beneath me, in real time.

For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She’d seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains. What she’d seen in that flash wasn’t even a “mountain.” It wasn’t a natural resource. It had no name. “That’s the big goal,” she said. “To find a cure for knowledge.” For education. For living in our heads.

Society’s shifting tectonic plates pose a challenge. The individual lives in a state of continually becoming. Constant motion is necessary to achieve balance and progression. Simone de Beauvoir touched on this in The Ethics of Ambiguity, observing that: ‘life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying’. When our worldview and what we hold to be true is challenged, we experience a sense of disorientation, a culture shock. In Buddhism, the term dukkha describes this state of being. Dukkha is the pain we experience when we cannot figure out how to let go of what no longer exists. It is usually translated into English as suffering but it also means temporary, limited and imperfect.

The real game, as I soon discover, is donburi. Donburi, often shortened to don, means "bowl," and the name encapsulates a vast array of rice bowls topped with delicious stuff: oyakodon (chicken and egg), unadon (grilled eel), tendon (tempura). As nice as meat and tempura and eel can be, the donburi of yours and mine and every sensible person's dreams is topped with a rainbow bounty of raw fish. Warm rice, cool fish, a dab of wasabi, a splash of soy- sushi, without the pageantry and without the price tag. At Kikuyo Shokudo Honten you will find more than three dozen varieties of seafood dons, including a kaleidoscopic combination of uni, salmon, ikura (salmon roe), quail eggs, and avocado. I opt for what I've come to call the Hokkaido Superhero's Special: scallops, salmon roe, hairy crab, and uni. It's ridiculous hyperbole to call a simple plate of food life changing, but as the tiny briny eggs pop and the sweet scallops dissolve and the uni melts like ocean Velveeta, I feel some tectonic shift taking place just below my surface.

The ocean floor had identifiable formations such as the continental shelf near the continents' landmass. Here it is generally thought of as that part of the continent that is underwater. Perhaps it could be better thought of as that part that corresponds to the area of the mainland between the beach and the point where the continent falls off into the abyss. Other terms include the seabed, seafloor, sea floor, or ocean floor which is the bottom of the ocean. If this area were to be dry it would include many of the same features found on land, such as mountain ranges and flat plains. Some of these mountains penetrate the surface to become islands. The Hawaiian and Caribbean islands are examples of this. In the Atlantic Ocean the mid-Atlantic riff also has many examples such as Iceland, the Azores Madeira, Ascension Island and Saint Helena. These islands follow a seismic crack or fault line between adjacent tectonic plates. It runs 24,855 miles, mostly underwater, from the Polar Regions in both the northern and southern hemispheres. There is a concern that as more ice melts due to global warming some of the lands near the ocean, including entire islands, will relatively soon become flooded, Coastal Florida is definitely an area of concern, however politicians have not yet noticed! Usually a seabed describes the Seafloor and its characteristics such as the type of sediment, sand or stones covering it. Some scientists differentiate the Ocean floor from the Sea bottom, by the water over it such as that of an Ocean a Gulf or a Sea. Although it can be made to sound complicated these nouns are basically synonymous and in most cases can be used interchangeably.

The tectonic plates of his heart had shifted and the rearrangement wasn’t something he would ever recover from.

…when something seems complicated, we do not understand it, but when we do understand something, it has become simple.

This curve, which looks like an elongated S, is variously known as the logistic, sigmoid, or S curve. Peruse it closely, because it’s the most important curve in the world. At first the output increases slowly with the input, so slowly it seems constant. Then it starts to change faster, then very fast, then slower and slower until it becomes almost constant again. The transfer curve of a transistor, which relates its input and output voltages, is also an S curve. So both computers and the brain are filled with S curves. But it doesn’t end there. The S curve is the shape of phase transitions of all kinds: the probability of an electron flipping its spin as a function of the applied field, the magnetization of iron, the writing of a bit of memory to a hard disk, an ion channel opening in a cell, ice melting, water evaporating, the inflationary expansion of the early universe, punctuated equilibria in evolution, paradigm shifts in science, the spread of new technologies, white flight from multiethnic neighborhoods, rumors, epidemics, revolutions, the fall of empires, and much more. The Tipping Point could equally well (if less appealingly) be entitled The S Curve. An earthquake is a phase transition in the relative position of two adjacent tectonic plates. A bump in the night is just the sound of the microscopic tectonic plates in your house’s walls shifting, so don’t be scared. Joseph Schumpeter said that the economy evolves by cracks and leaps: S curves are the shape of creative destruction. The effect of financial gains and losses on your happiness follows an S curve, so don’t sweat the big stuff. The probability that a random logical formula is satisfiable—the quintessential NP-complete problem—undergoes a phase transition from almost 1 to almost 0 as the formula’s length increases. Statistical physicists spend their lives studying phase transitions.

Plate tectonics will be plate tectonics.

It's plate tectonics," Mark said. "You know, the continents float around on top of the melted rock inside the Earth." Frank listened absently. No point in correcting Mark. But the Mojave was certainly a better place.

We are doomed to endlessly enact patterns of behaviour not of our own creation; not of anyone's creation really, until some seismic shift in the cultural equivalent of tectonic plates lands us somehow in a new, equally inexplicable arrangement.

The wounds Mao sought to reopen had been inflicted during the nineteenth century when the future superpowers were grinding against each other like so many tectonic plates. The world as we know it was forming then, along fault lines of race, culture, and geography.

Trazyn had travelled the galaxy for so long he’d forgotten what year he’d started. Collecting. Studying. Ordering the cultures of the cosmos. And one thing he’d learned was that every society thought their mountain was special. That it was more sacred than the mountain worshipped by their neighbouring tribe. That it was the one true axis of the universe. Even when informed that their sacred ridge was merely the random connection of tectonic plates, or their blessed sword a very old but relatively common alien relic – a revelation they universally did not appreciate, he found – they clung to their stories.

As one geological scientist has put it, life is a tectonic force, changing what chemical compounds get made, buried, and even recycled as the tectonic plates push minerals deep into the crust and bring them back up again.

We are not individually much cleverer than the average animal, a heron or a mole, but the knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire. Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects – and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage. The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds – a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.

Thanks to the theory of plate tectonics, we now know that the continents are constantly on the move,

We trust nature. When we happen upon a technology such as stemcell regenerative therapy, we experience hope. But we also immediately ask how natural this technology is. And so we are caught between two huge and unconscious forces: Our deepest hope as humans lies in technology; but our deepest trust lies in nature. These forces are like tectonic plates grinding inexorably into each other in one long, slow collision.

We can now see that the fundamental difference between those divergent visions of earth’s final kingdom is not about ends, but about means. The imperial kingdom of Rome—and this may indeed apply to any other empire as well—had as its program peace through victory. The eschatological kingdom of God has as its program peace through justice. Both intend peace—one by violence, the other by nonviolence. And still those tectonic plates grind against one another.

Cascadia is, after all, a place of the heart as much as it is a specific landscape. No one really agrees what its physical borders are. Is it a bioregion? Is it a repressed nation defined by state and provincial borders that strains to free itself from the smothering clutches of the imperialist US of A and Canada? Are its borders defined by the tectonic plates of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, or the spawning grounds of the enigmatic Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus?

Without plate tectonics, the mobility of the plates that form the earth’s crust, there would be no life upon earth. The experts say that this is one of the preconditions for the earth’s being able to maintain a stable average temperature over billions of years—something without which life could not have evolved.15 The earth is the only planet in the solar system that possesses this flexible geological structure. It is also the only place in which higher life forms have been able to develop. We are confronted by a paradox: the thing that causes earthquakes, which time and again bring about the deaths of many people, is at the same time the precondition for the existence on this earth of ourselves, and of all complex life forms.

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)

After dinner I told her I wouldn’t put away the plates, because I might cause an earthquake (plate tectonics).

The drifting of continents—now universally accepted as plate tectonics—is far too gradual for humans to perceive. The same is true for other highly significant phenomena. When Charles Darwin first proposed natural selection, he faced at least as much resistance as Wegener; although his theory explained myriad observations, nobody had actually seen finches evolving. Likewise, the effects of our own collective activity—such as climate change and loss of biodiversity—are almost invisible to us, because the impact spans the whole planet, growing over centuries. Like plate tectonics and evolution, the arrival of the Anthropocene epoch is not a human-scale phenomenon. Buckminster Fuller conceived the Geoscope as a tool to help humans attain a global perspective, to see worldwide events and to probe geological time. It was to be an instrument for scoping Earth’s patterns—an instrument of comprehensive anticipatory design science. And though it was never built adjacent to the United Nations, he always carried one in his head. In order to anticipate comprehensively, the present-day design scientist must do as he did. Design scientists must be sensitive to natural patterns of change and human patterns of activity, extrapolating from fragmentary evidence. In the Anthropocene, these patterns will be interrelated. And since human activity is the driving force, they not only can be observed but also can be impacted. However, patterns must be detected before they become settled, before the consequences are foregone conclusions. Unlike Wegener and Darwin, the design scientist cannot be passive. There

Fortunately for us, the sedimentary sink is transitory. Sediments are transported on the giant crustal plates that float like rafts on the hot heavier material of the underlying mantle. When plates converge, they can be either uplifted or they may be withdrawn into the underlying mantle. Uplift results in the formation of mountain ranges. Carbon (and other life-essential elements) may be cycled directly back to the atmosphere/biosphere system, in this case by weathering of the uplifted rock material. If the sedimentary material is carried down into the mantle, it will be raised to high temperature through exposure to the hot mantle material. The carbon and other volatile materials included in the sediments may be released and transferred, often explosively, back to either the atmosphere or ocean as a component of hot springs and volcanoes. The average carbon atom has gone through this tectonically driven cycling sequence at least 10 times over the course of Earth history. How

After Venus lost its oceans to a runaway greenhouse, the interior also would have started to dry out, and this might have shut down plate tectonics. The question has forced a closer look at how and why plate tectonics works on Earth. We’ve learned there are many ways that plate tectonics is aided and lubricated by the presence of our planet’s pervasive hydrosphere. Venus could have started out with Earth-style plate tectonics and then lost its ability to recycle its surface and interior, as it lost its water to a runaway greenhouse, and the interior of the planet was slowly wrung dry.

If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture—the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Pebbles, Rocks & Mountains Rocks can be formed in many different ways and are found in just about every corner of our planet, the Moon, up in space and who knows where else. Now pebbles are the mini-me’s of rocks and generally are about one to three inches in size. Geologists will tell you that they are about 5 millimeters in diameter, but who’s counting? In fact there are two beaches that are made up entirely of pebbles such as the Shingle Beach in Somerset, England. Generally pebbles are found along rivers, streams and creeks whereas mountains are usually a part of a chain that was created along geothermal fault lines. The process of Mountain formation is associated with movements of the earth's crust, which is referred to as plate tectonics. See; now that I looked it up, I know these things! What I’m about to say has absolutely nothing to do with geology and everything to do about human nature. In the course of events we never trip over mountains and seldom over rocks, but tripping over pebbles is another thing. Marilyn French, a writer and feminist scholar is credited with saying, “Men (she should have included Women) stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.” She was the lady (I should have said woman) whose provocative 1977 novel, “The Women's Room” captured the frustration and fury of a generation of women fed up with society's traditional conceptions of their roles (and this is true). However, this has nothing to do with the feminist movement and is simply a metaphor. Of course we’re not going to trip over mountains, not unless we are bigger than the “Jolly Green Giant!” and so it’s usually the little things that trip us up and cause us problems. What comes to mind is found on page 466 of The Exciting Story of Cuba. This is a book that won two awards by the “Florida Authors & Publishers Association” and yet there are small mistakes. They weren’t even caused by me or my team and yet there they are, getting bigger and bigger every time I look at them. Now I’m not about to tell you what they are, since that would take the fun out of it, but if you look hard enough in the book, you’ll succeed in discovering them! I will however tell you that one of these mistakes was caused by a computer program called “Word.” It’s wonderful that this program has a spell check and can even correct my grammar, but it can’t read my mind. In its infernal wisdom, the program was so insistent that it was right and that I was wrong that it changed the spelling of, in this case, the name of a person in the middle of the night. It happened while I was sleeping! I would have seen it if it had been as big as a mountain, however being just a little pebble it escaped my review and even escaped the eagle eyes of Lucy who still remains the best proof reader and copy editor that I know. When you discover what I missed please refrain from emailing me, although, normally, I would really enjoy hearing from you! I unfortunately already know most of the errors in the book, for which I take full responsibility. The truth of it is that my mistakes leave me feeling stupid and frustrated. Now, you may disagree with me however I don’t think that I am really all that stupid, but when you write hundreds of thousands of words, a few of them might just slip between the cracks. None of us are infallible and we all make mistakes. I sometimes like to say that “I once thought that I had made a mistake, but then found out that I was mistaken.” And so it is; if you think about it, it’s the pebbles that create most of our problems, not the rocks and certainly not the mountains. I’ll let you know as soon as my other books, Suppressed I Rise – Revised Edition; Seawater One…. And Words of Wisdom, “From the Bridge” are available. It’s Seawater One that has the naughty bits in it… but that just spices it up. Now with that book you can really tell me what you think….

Other than the external threat of asteroid and comet strikes (a common hazard throughout the solar system), all Earth’s natural hazards go hand in hand with its habitability. Indeed, Earth seems to be constructed almost perfectly to create calamities, with an outer shell thick enough to be rigid but thin enough to be breakable. Earthquakes, tsunamis, and extreme volcanic transformations are the price we pay for the life-sustaining gift of plate tectonics. Likewise, Earth’s atmosphere is primed to do damage by just the same qualities that make it so nurturing. Sun-animated, water-saturated, and seasonally shifting, our dynamic atmosphere maintains our comfortable climate. Its motions feed and water us, but can also swirl into violent storms that flood villages and splinter cities. Tornadoes, floods, blizzards, and climate shifts are collateral damage from life-enabling flows of energy, water, and chemical elements. All are also symptoms of Earth’s destructive/creative energy flows.*

I wanted to say that lots of things weren't in the libraries of the wise, including plate tectonics, molecular biology and the complete works of J. K. Rowling, but she'd probably say that I was missing the point.

there exists a link between climate change-induced heavy rainfall contributing to pressure on the tectonic plates and earthquakes.

Albert Einstein. He was one of the most scathing critics of Wegener’s hypothesis on tectonic plate movement. I believe that he called it utter nonsense. Not that I hold anything against Einstein. It just proves that even the most ferociously intelligent people can get things horribly wrong.

If we extrapolate this rate of overturn back in geologic time, the ocean floor has apparently been rejuvenated at least two dozen times since the Earth formed. When Earth was younger and hotter, however, the pace of convection may have been faster, and the ocean floor may have been resurfaced more frequently. But this leads to a conundrum: If convection had been faster in the past, as most geoscientists think it was, ocean crust would have arrived at subduction zones at a younger average age, still too hot and buoyant to be assimilated back into the mantle. This suggests that true plate tectonics, with rigid crustal slabs, efficient recycling of ocean crust via subduction, and water-assisted production of low-temperature melts, may not have occurred on the early Earth. Instead, plate tectonics could begin only when the Earth had reached a degree of thermal maturity, probably about 2.5 billion years ago (around the close of the Archean eon and the beginning of the Proterozoic). Before this, Earth's mixer settings—and the extent to which surface water was stirred back into the interior—were probably different. We can look to rocks formed in these distant times, Earth's record of its childhood and youth, for clues.

Three dominant hypotheses explain what drives plate tectonic motion. Each one relies on the convention of the mantle — the movement of heated rock materials beneath earth’s crust — but each one focuses on a different piece of the cycle: Mantle convection hypothesis: This hypothesis proposes that heated materials inside the earth move up and down in a circular motion (like the wax in a lava lamp) and the continental plates resting on this mat-erial are moved in the direction of the circular motion. Ridge-push hypothesis: This hypothesis states that the creation of new rock materials along mid-ocean ridges continually pushes oceanic crustal plates upward and outward, so that the far edges are forced into collisions with other plates. Slab-pull hypothesis: This hypothesis is the opposite of the ridge-push model. It proposes that the heavy, dense outer edges of crustal plates sink into the mantle at plate boundaries and pull the rest of the plate along with them.

Baikal is what you call a rift lake,” Travis explained further. “It was formed millions of years ago when there was a shift in tectonic plates and it must have been a major one, because I just found out that the bottom of this lake actually lies about three thousand nine hundred feet below sea level.” Adam marveled at that fact for a minute then said, “If that’s true then it’s quite possible for there to be oil deposits here or natural gas. High pressure forming gem stones like diamonds and emeralds are also a huge possibility.” “Mining wouldn’t be sanctioned so near the lake though,” Fiona pointed out. “To complicate matters more, Lake Baikal is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There’s no way anybody could start a mining operation here without an international world war breaking out.

Deep within the mountain, though, there are more magma chambers. The North American tectonic plate continues to drift westward, while the Juan de Fuca plate subducts under it, melting at depth, this magma feeding the Cascade mountain range's twenty-five active volcanoes. In a month, Mount Hood will be sleeping again. But only for now.

The back-and-forth ancient lull of the tide. The cry of seagulls passing overhead. The smell of salt and fish carried on the warm breeze. With each step along the old wooden planks of the pier, tiny grains of sand that hitchhiked from the beach below are pulverized under our heels. Sand that traveled millions of miles over billions of years across shifting continents and churning oceans, surviving plate tectonics, erosion, and sedimentary deposition is crushed by our new sandals. The cosmos can be cruel.

Life on this planet has always been a balancing act—a complex web of interconnectivity that’s surprisingly fragile. Remove or even alter enough key components and that web begins to fray and fall apart. Such a collapse—or mass extinction—has happened five times in our planet’s geological past. The first struck four hundred million years ago, when most marine life died off. The third event hit both land and sea at the end of the Permian Period, wiping out 90 percent of the world’s species, coming within a razor’s edge of ending all life on earth. The fifth and most recent extinction took out the dinosaurs, ushering in the era of mammals and altering the world forever. How close are we to seeing such an event happen again? Some scientists believe we’re already there, neck-deep in a sixth mass extinction. Every hour, three more species go extinct, totaling over thirty thousand a year. Worst of all, the rate of this die-off is continually rising. At this very moment, nearly half of all amphibians, a quarter of all mammals, and a third of all reefs balance at the edge of extinction. Even a third of all conifer trees teeter at that brink. Why is this happening? In the past, such massive die-offs had been triggered by sudden changes in global climate or shifts in plate tectonics, or in the case of the dinosaurs, possibly even an asteroid strike. Yet most scientists believe this current crisis has a simpler explanation: humans. Through our trampling of the environment and rise in pollution, mankind has been the driving force behind the loss of most species. According to a report by Duke University released in May 2014, human activity has driven species into extinction at the rate a thousandfold faster than before the arrival of modern man.

And it sounds like two tectonic plates are getting it on somewhere beneath us

surface of the two leaders’ personal relationship are the shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics. With the expansion of Chinese power into the Indian Ocean, American and Indian interests in the region are gradually converging. It is difficult to say which government was more quietly gratified this month when Sri Lanka’s Beijing-aligned

Science constantly furnishes us with astonishing ideas about the nature of reality. Physics tells us that there may be an infinite number of universes, of which ours is just one, and that perhaps two particles in no physical contact with one another can somehow influence each other’s properties. From evolutionary biology we learn that birds are the only living descendents of dinosaurs. Geologists reveal that, as a result of the current trajectory of the Earth’s tectonic plates, Australia will eventually collide with Alaska. Contemporary educated people have grown used to the idea that, at least where the causal structure of the world uninfluenced by human agency is concerned, our stock of“commonsense” assumptions and principles is systematically unreliable as a guide to the facts. Our everyday scale of perceptions, along both its temporal and its spatial dimensions, is simply too pinched and unrepresentative to be trusted as a direct window onto wider truths, at least about physics, geology, astronomy, microbiology, and so on.