Reef Facts Quotes

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To the untrained (human) eye, Thalassinia looks like an expanse of coral reefs and volcanic formations. There are no straight lines or geometric shapes to give away the fact that the structures are actually mermade. (Get it? Mermade. Like mermaid, but…oh, never mind.)
Tera Lynn Childs (Forgive My Fins (Fins, #1))
You said we've got a new page. I figure I've got some say in what gets written on it. So I'm going to work on you. Last time around, you threw yourself at me.” “I did no such thing.” “Sure you did. But I can see I've got my work cut out for me this time. That's okay.” He skimmed his thumb over her knuckles before she jerked her hand free. “In fact, I think I'm going to enjoy it.” “I don't know why I waste my time trying to mend fences with you. You're as arrogant as you ever were.” “Just the way you like me, sweetheart.
Nora Roberts (The Reef)
Life itself is a sea full of reefs and maelstroms that a human being takes the greatest care and caution to avoid; he uses all his efforts and ingenuity to wend his way through, while knowing that even if he is successful, every step brings him closer to the greatest, the total, the inescapable and irreparable shipwreck, and in fact steers him right up to it, - to death: this is the final goal of the miserable journey and worse for him that all the reefs he managed to avoid.
Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, Volume I)
Illustrative of this long-term funding gap is the fact that in 2013 the best maps of our own seafloor had a resolution of three miles. The best maps of Mars had a resolution of 330 feet.
Juli Berwald (Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs)
Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.
Robert Harris (The Ghost)
I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Charles Darwin (Autobiography Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Descent of Man A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World Coral Reefs Voyage of the Beagle Origin of Species Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals)
On September 6, 1522, a battered ship appeared on the horizon … A small pilot boat was dispatched to lead the strange ship over the reefs … The vessel they were guiding into the harbor was manned by a skeleton crew of just eighteen sailors and three captives, all of them severely malnourished. … Their captain was dead, as were the officers, the boatswains, and the pilots; in fact, nearly the entire crew had perished … the ship, Victoria, … had departed three years earlier. No one knew what had become of her … Despite the journey’s hardships, Victoria and her diminished crew accomplished what no other ship had ever done before. By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination, the first circumnavigation of the globe
Laurence Bergreen (Magellan: Over the Edge of the World)
THE NEXT DAY Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty were out on the Anarchists’ golf course, during a round of Anarchists’ Golf, a craze currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed sequence—in fact, no fixed number—of holes, with distances flexible as well, some holes being only putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate. Many players had been known to come there at night and dig new ones. Parties were likely to ask, “Do you mind if we don’t play through?” then just go and whack balls at any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. “This is kind of fun,” Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his ear.
Thomas Pynchon
Somers and Newport, too, knew there was no way to bring the Sea Venture to anchor. Her hull was so open, her planks so sprung, that the ship would sink like one of the cannon they’d already jettisoned if they tried to anchor in deep water. Their only hope was to run on until the battered ship took the ground. Closer and closer to land the vessel inched. By this time, Somers and the others could see a beach ahead. Sir George may have wanted to try to run the ship up on the beach. He surely wanted to get as close to terra firma as possible. For a few moments, as the ship wallowed toward land, the old salt may have thought he would be able to drive the ship high and dry on the beach. Suddenly, though, Somers would have seen white water ahead and probably heard the sound of waves breaking on what he would have instantly known was a reef. Even if the old admiral had wanted to, there was no way to turn the vessel—barely time, in fact, to shout a warning to the passengers and crew on the deck. Then the Sea Venture struck, driving into a V-shaped opening in the reef that surrounds the Bermudas like a ship-killing necklace. She plunged like a wedge between massive coral heads that tore at the vessel’s hull like the claws of a huge beast.
Kieran Doherty (Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown)
The sea levels fall and lower temperatures during glacial events kill higher latitude coral reefs and they continue to thrive at lower latitudes. The geological record shows that coral reefs love it warm, especially when there is more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
In fact, it is unlikely that all the men on the island went in search of food and water. While some went foraging, others would have set about building rough shelters, thatched with palm fronds, above the high-water mark. At the same time, sailors, probably under the watchful eye of Sir George Somers, made repeated trips to the grounded vessel, salvaging anything that might be of service. Planks above the waterline were torn from the ship’s oaken frames and hauled ashore along with hatches and any undamaged spars that could be removed and metal fittings and canvas and cordage and tools and even books and the important charts from Newport’s cabin and, of course, the instructions and a copy of the new Virginia charter given to Gates by the officers of the Virginia Company in London. Somehow the heavy ship’s bell was hauled ashore, as were several heavy cooking kettles and at least one of the smallest cannon. Within days, though, the salvage operation came to an end as the Sea Venture slipped beneath the waves, to rest where her bones still lie, between the two coral outcroppings that trapped her. Even though the survivors must have known the ship was lost once it struck the reef,
Kieran Doherty (Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown)
Few Americans can claim to know China as well as Ambassador Stapleton Roy. Born in China, a fluent Mandarin speaker, Roy also served as the American ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995 and has stayed exceptionally well informed on US-China relations. He explained what happened: In a joint press conference with President Obama on September 25, 2015, Xi Jinping had proposed a more reasonable approach on the South China Sea. Xi had supported full and effective implementation of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, signed by China and all ten ASEAN members; had called for early conclusion of the China-ASEAN consultations on a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea; and had added that China had no intention of militarizing the Spratlys, where it had engaged in massive reclamation work on the reefs and shoals it occupied. Roy said that Obama missed an opportunity to capitalize on this reasonable proposal. Instead, the US Navy stepped up its naval patrols. China responded by proceeding with militarization. In short, Xi did not renege on a promise. His offer was effectively spurned by the US Navy. The big question is how an untruth becomes accepted as a fact by well-informed, thoughtful Western elites.
Kishore Mahbubani (Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy)
The Great Barrier Reef is so extensive that no human mind can take it in, the exception perhaps being astronauts who've seen its full length from outer space. Gigantism pervades its statistics. Roughly half the size of Texas, it encloses some 215,000 square miles of coastland, sea, and coral. It extends for about 1,430 miles along Australia's east coast, and encompasses around three thousand individual reefs and a thousand islands. So vast is it, in fact, that it's only since the 1970s, with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, that a size has been more or less agreed upon. Prior to that, explorers and navigators gave varying figures for its length.
Iain McCalman (The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change)
To help him through mine school, Frank had borrowed some money from his brother Reef, who in those days was known for promoting quick cash out of the air. “Don’t know when I can pay this back, old Reefer.” “Whenever that is, if I’m still alive, that would be payback enough for me, so don’t worry.” As usual, Reef wasn’t thinking that closely about what he was saying, finding it in fact impossible to imagine any kind of a future in which being dead was preferable to living. Part of the same rooster-in-the-morn attitude that kept him winning at games of chance. Or winning enough. Or he thought it did. One day out of the usual nowhere, Reef showed up in Golden to find Frank with his nose in a metallurgy book. “I have a chore to run, sort of romantic chore, nothing too difficult, you want to come along?” “Where to? Being’s I’ve got this exam?” Flapping the book pages at his brother for emphasis. “Well you look like you could use a break. Why don’t we go up Castle Rock to that amusement park and have us a few beers.” Why didn’t they? Frank had no idea. Next thing he knew it was daytime again, Reef had squared everything with the Professor, and they were headed for Nevada.
Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
In the interim, the South China Sea has become an armed camp, even as the scramble for reefs is mostly over. China has confiscated twelve geographical features, Taiwan one, the Vietnamese twenty-one, the Malaysians five, and the Philippines nine. In other words, facts have already been created on the ground.
Anonymous