Plate Tectonics 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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

We are witnessing a shift in the political tectonic plates throughout the whole of the Middle East and beyond into Africa, and the west’s apparently surgical involvement will probably do little more than generate some short-term satisfaction that we are doing something. It is not that I am morally squeamish about bombing IS fanatics. Rather, I think we ought to recognise that we are little more than bystanders to a war that is so much bigger than we ever imagined, and so much more complicated than the rhetoric of terrorism or limited conflict allows. Since the second world war, we have got used to the idea that big war is a thing of the past. But no more. This is the third world war. And this time we are on its fringes.

Why might there not be as many real worlds as imaginary ones? Why a single real world? Why such an exception? Truth to tell, the real world, among all the other possible ones, is unthinkable, except as dangerous superstition. We must break with it as critical thought once broke (in the name of the real!) with religious superstition. Thinkers, one more effort! In any case, the two orders of thought are irreconcilable. They each follow their course without merging; at best they slide over each other like tectonic plates, and occasionally their collision or subduction creates fault lines into which reality rushes. Fate is always at the intersection of these two lines of force. Similarly, radical thought is at the violent intersection of meaning and non-meaning, of truth and non-truth, of the continuity of the world and the continuity of the nothing.

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.

Duff rolled his eyes so hard it caused a shift in the tectonic plates. “Golly, Chuck Woolery, the least you could do is buy the man a half-hour with a sympathetic hooker for an unenthusiastic hand job.

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

Things had fundamentally changed, and like tectonic plates shifting on the surface of the earth, her world and Matt's no longer fitted together. They were sliding in different directions and she had no idea how to pull them back together

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.

Because we sit there in the gap for a long time saying [gasps]. And that’s when you begin to learn the meaning of ‘Lord Have Mercy’. I can’t do anything to raise my state but what I can do is stay honestly ahead of, in plain sight, what’s happened, acknowledging. Here I am. And I think it’s from that repeated acknowledgement of my own helplessness at that level, but refusing to simply hide from that helplessness, that gradually, gradually, gradually the energy that had originally gone into your, sort of, ego programmes gets recaptured to begin to hold this other kind of field of awareness, of attentiveness, that’s not identified with that small self acting out and can begin to become a nest for that deeper and fuller and truer wiser self to live in. And then we begin to Be. Then we begin to have Being. And it’s from that Being that sometimes we can pull ourselves out of that spiral we were heading into, and it’s from that Being that we can begin to offer our force of Being to the world as love, as assistance, as a shift in the energy field for someone else. ‘Baraka’ the Sufis call it. But it comes slowly, because you can’t just, kind of, click your heels together and have Being. It has to accumulate slowly in your being for a life of painfully bearing the crucifixion of inner honesty, and slowly it emerges. Interviewer: So that brings up the question in me, what is then freedom? Because you go on this journey. We start out on this journey to become free, which we call enlightenment. Cynthia: Well, you know, we have so many mixed metaphors as Western and Eastern ways of contexting reality come together like tectonic plates. And they don’t often match up. I think, in a very obvious way, freedom is easy. At the obvious level, what it means is what you’d call ‘freedom from the false self’. Most of us think we’re free, and yet we are not free at all because we are under the absolute compulsion of agendas, addictions and aversions that have been programmed into us from early life, and sometimes from the womb. We have our values, we have our triggers, we have our flash points, we have our agendas. And, as A.H. Almaas said so famously, “Freedom to be your ego is not freedom.” Because that’s slavery. You’re being pulled around by a bull ring in the nose. So part of the work of freedom begins when you can stabilise in yourself this thing that some of the Eastern traditions helpfully call ‘witnessing presence’, which is something deeper that’s not dependent on the pain-pleasure principle, that’s not attracted by attraction, or repulsed by aversion. You know, as my teacher Rafe, the hermit monk of Snowmass, Colorado, used to say, “I want to have enough Being to be nothing.” Which means he is not dependant on the world to give him his identity, because he’s learned his identity nests in something much deeper. [...] And as you finally become free to follow what you might call the ‘homing beacon of your own inner calling’, you realise that it’s only in that complete obedience that freedom lies. And, of course, the trick to that is the word ‘obedience’, which we usually thinks means knuckling under, or capitulating, really comes from the Latin ‘ob audire’, which means ‘to listen deeply’. So, as we listen deeply to the fundamental, what you might call the ‘tuning fork’ of our being – which is given to us not by ourself and is never about self-realisation because the self melts as that realisation comes closer – you find the only freedom is to be your own cell in the vast mystical body of God.

Change within our lives is equivocal to the shifting of earth’s tectonic plates.

Chapter VII Dragon’s Tail The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound! The earth’s crust can be compared to a cracked eggshell consisting of tectonic plates

Millions of years ago, two tectonic plates merged and created a unique landscape

Hartland Point is a geologist’s delight. The rock on this coast changes and changes and changes again, but at Hartland Point it’s unlike anything else. Created in shallow seas 320 million years ago, the sedimentary strata are formed from layers of sand, shale and mudstone. Around 290 million years ago, when the Gondwana tectonic plate moved up from the south and collided with the Laurasia plate in the north, they met in a huge upswell of rock known as the Variscan orogeny. It formed mountains through Portugal, western Spain, Cornwall, Devon and on through the south and west of Wales and Ireland. The Hartland Point cliffs are carved out in sandstone ribs that rise up into chevron-shaped rock folds. A movement millennia old, still visible, still alive beneath our feet.

Evidence from a global volcanic cataclysm: Effects of massive ocean warming. Global lava flows, with ubiquitous layers of volcanic rock on land and in the sea. Massive plate tectonics with splitting and shifting of continents.

Right now, images from 3055 show that Earth’s tectonic plates have shifted to the point in which all the continents are close to becoming just one continent! Pangaea is being recreated! If there is a time when the continents actually do come together, it might be harder to identify individual continents when they are all forged together in a single mass, so a person may attempt to redraw lines between the continents to help students continue to be able to identify them, which is beneficial to the community, because it supports the continuation of geographical education; people could distinguish continents, which is beneficial to analyzing each continent. However, suppose the person who made the lines believed that a certain religious group were terrorists. Suppose that person made the lines, because he/she wants to divide the continent the religious group is located in and the continent he/she lives in. That way, there could be a boundary between the continent where the religious group lives and the continent where the person lives. One may consider this to be religious intolerance, and hence believe it to be immoral, which exemplifies that a person’s intentions must also be considered in discussions about morality.

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.

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.

If the Chicago we’d left behind was all lake-frozen winds, Vancouver was wet springtime chill, with swirls of rain drizzling from banks of black clouds that scraped over the coast with the ponderous density of tectonic plates.

I cannot bear that lowering myself from the waist down will force one fat roll to collide with another like Earth’s tectonic plates, and the subduction energy that results will bring me faster to unconsciousness than sniffing glue.

We are mistaken in thinking that Jewish liturgy has been around for millennia in precisely its current form. The documents of the Cairo Genizah remind us that ancient words never stagnate. Often imperceptibly, sometimes violently, ancient Jewish rituals move and shift and create new realities in each generation. They are the liturgical tectonic plates of the Jewish world.

It is the human equivalent of geological pressure. Two tectonic plates can grind against one another for millions of years, the tension slowly building all the while. Then, one day, they rub each other once again, in the same fashion they have for ages, but this time the tension is too great. An earthquake erupts. Change can take years—before it happens all at once.

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.

[The features of Earth's mantle], among others, appear so intricate and specific that Earth may well be the only rocky planet on which plate tectonic activity, at a survivable level for life, has been operating for an extended period, much less approaching 4 billion years.

You can’t swear revenge on a tectonic plate.

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.

As students, we have already studied the four spheres and some of their basic interactions, and we have already reviewed the basics of erosion, deposition, and weathering. Since fifth grade, we have been told that photosynthesis converts solar energy to chemical energy, and since sixth grade, we have been told about Pangaea and Plate Tectonics. It is all just a loop. We are just learning the same things over and over again. I have always been left to ask myself, “Can’t I just find an activity that does not provide me with knowledge that is RUDIMENTARY AND SUPERFICIAL?

The earth rotated. Tectonic plates shifted. Twelve acres of rain forest disappeared from the globe forever.

As the days began to feel like they were all bleeding into one another, the lines separating them becoming but a blurred gradient resembling lines not at all, with the world continuing to spin regardless of mortal toil, the tectonic plates shifting beneath our feet, and people growing everywhere around, for him, at least one thing remained constant: the aromatic scent of coffee tinging the air, kissing his nostrils. Some say that no true satisfaction could be found in instant gratification. Danny begged to differ as he moved to pour his first cup. Coffee, our way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self. Sipping the hot bean water, he felt ready~

Then, as far as I could figure, a couple of tectonic plates must have smashed together, because the whole world lurched, and my ears started ringing so loudly I could only catch bits of what he was saying. None of it could be right. It didn't make sense.