Sedimentary Rock Quotes

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.

The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete.

Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.

Homer was so used to being told off in his life that you might as well have told a rock off for being sedimentary,

Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.

Now, Faith dear…” “Yes, cousin?” “Of course, you look absolutely ravishing, but perhaps no mention of rocks right away?” “Not a single sedimentary sequence shall pass my lips, I promise.” Faith attempted to look grave. “I don’t know what that means, dear, but thank you.

Poets dream of being archaeologists, as if their lives were sedimentary, like rocks. Poets don't mind getting down and dirty with the past.

Unkar Delta at Mile 73 The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke’s description of “raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet.” Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified.

I still cherish my childhood memories of the sun opening the dusky eyelids of the west and the misty mornings against the backdrop of of Kgalatlou Mountain. The green prime of summer, twingling leaves of acacia yrees of Manthakge Plains, pure clear sky, the smooth plough fields and lush green meadows. In winter, that green carpet will be replaced by drearily looking land like a dim picture of the drowned past, all signs of life and feeling gone out of it, with the plough fields scorched and naked, the streams of Manyane silent, and the grass of the meadows looking like burned powder.  I still remember and cherish the touch of autumn nights and the ruddy moon leaning over Madibong. When I think about this, a sorrowful silent tear always roll down my cheek, I become sad and gripped by grief because of what has now become of the land of my forefathers. I have known and cherished its distinguished  rocks, fauna, and flora since I could stand and walk. I know its mountain slopes, plains, its rocks, and bushes like the veins and knuckles at the back of my hand. The ever changing beauty of Leolo Mountains, from the aloes of Segodi Boulders to the lilies of Legaletlweng; the imposing Letheleding Boulders towering over Manyane Dale. The interesting contrast of granite ingenious sedimentary rocks of Leolo Mountains and the red sand rock of Seolwane Mountain, the red sandy soil of Leruleng, the dark clay soil of Marakane and the red fertile loom soil of Sehalbeng Plains. The Magnetite rocks Ga - Sethadi and the shale rocks of Malatjane.

[...] I have found that there is a rock that supports my faith. But it's a borrowed rock, kind of a sedimentary rock composed in good measure of the faith of others.

I kiss him back and try to shrink my anger, to swallow it down with all the mucus and the bile. But whenever I try to do that, whenever I try to make my anger disappear, it just gets harder and more compact, like sedimentary rock, and then I’m left with this hard compact in my chest. I give up on asking what he saw at the doctors’. My heart becomes a little stone.

Of the three Highwood sisters, she was the only dark-haired one, the only bespectacled one, the only one who preferred sturdy lace-up boots to silk slippers, and the only one who cared one whit about the difference between sedimentary and metamorphic rocks. The only one with no prospects, no reputation to protect.

contents of the guts of several animals.46 The discoveries near Chengjiang demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that sedimentary rocks can preserve soft-bodied fossils of great antiquity and in exquisite detail, thereby challenging the idea that the absence of Precambrian ancestors

Thus, discovery of an embryo in the earliest stages of cell division shows beyond a doubt that Precambrian sedimentary rocks can, under the right circumstances, preserve soft-bodied organisms.

Although the Cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking, it is far from the only “explosion” of new living forms. The first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals, and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock. Evolutionary theorist Eugene Koonin describes this as a “biological big bang” pattern. As he notes, “Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups . . . do not seem to fit the pattern that, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution.

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

Xela rapped on the walls. “It’s all sedimentary rock, isn’t it? Not really solid.” “Thus all the beams and supports,” said Nate.

That's when her poles reversed. The earth has experienced many polarity reversals, lasting from hundreds of thousands of years. Paleomagnetists can study sedimentary deposits on the ocean floor to date when these polarity reversals occurred. The anomaly can be observed as a stripe in the sedimentary rock layer. One thing was clear to her as she stared up at her twinkling star: nothing would ever be the same. Leticia believed that when she was dug up one day, there would be a visible stripe in her bones marking the moment she fell in love.

Ideal to pre-serve fossils are sedimentary rocks: limestones, sandstones, silt-stones, and shales. Compared with volcanic and metamorphic rocks, these are formed by more gentle processes, including the action of rivers, lakes, and seas. Not only are animals likely to live in such environments, but the sedimentary processes make these rocks more likely places to preserve fossils.

So here is the trick to designing a new fossil expedition: find rocks that are of the right age, of the right type (sedimentary), and well exposed, and we are in business. Ideal fossil-hunting sites have little soil cover and little vegetation, and have been subject to few human disturbances.

The ability of an object to constitute itself as a subject is thus defined, in the first instance, by the objective context provided by the genus; that is, the capacity or incapacity of an object to constitute itself as an individual subject depends first and foremost on the kind of thing the object is. For mechanical, chemical, and externally purposive objects, the power of the genus is determined essentially as violence insofar as these objects cannot constitute themselves as subjects through a predicate due to their very nature as defined by their genus. For example, a rock, qua rock, can be determined through a predicate externally - by means of external impact from other objects and forces (it can be crushed or cracked into pieces) or by means of human definition and conceptualization (this rock is igneous and that one is sedimentary) - but is cannot determine itself through a predicate and constitute itself as a subject by means of its own activity. The power of the objet to constitute itself as a subject is necessarily defined in relation to its essential Gattung-predicate, a predicate that manifests the power of violence insofar as the object is unable to constitute itself as a subject by means of this very same predicate. The third characteristic, finally, is that power as violence directs itself against individuality. In specifying that it is only in the presence of the freedom of self-consciousness that the power of the genus can be determined as fate, Hegel writes the following: 'Only self-consciousness has fate in the strict sense, because it is free, and therefore in the individuality of its 'I' it absolutely exists in and for itself and can oppose itself to its objective universality and alienate itself from it'. Individuality is thus defined as an existence in and for itself that can stand opposed to and be in contradiction with its objective universality or genus, while continuing to manifest the genus's power as identical with its own self-relation. Without the ability to oppose its genus, the ability to be self-alienated with respect to its genus, the object is not, strictly speaking, an individual (it remains a mere particular, a token of its type entirely interchangeable with other tokens of the same type). Individuality is therefore not only the power of the object to constitute itself as a subject through its predicate, but moreover, this power of self-constitution is essentially also the power to oppose, contradict, and transform the genus by means of the genus's own power as manifest in the determinateness of an individual.

Roger Revelle, an American oceanographer, and Hans Suess, a physical chemist, appraised the process of mass-scale fossil fuel combustion in its correct evolutionary terms: “Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”47 I cannot imagine what other phrasing could have better conveyed the unprecedented nature of this new reality

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.

Cynicism is evidence of having given up and given in. Cynicism is calcified anger. Cynicism is your once-tender heart now calloused and hardened. Cynicism looks like strata of sedimentary rock, each layer of protective distance compressing and solidifying the layer beneath-distance from your pain, distance from others' suffering, distance from the possibility that things might be more complicated than they seem on the surface. Cynicism feels like spiritual Novocain, numbing your whole range of deeply human emotion, because those feelings reflect frightening vulnerability and open up the possibility of yet more disappointment.

Beneath a world—in its rocks, its dirt and sedimentary overlays—there you find the planet’s memory, the complete analog of its existence, its ecological memory. —PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer

Sedimentary rocks are formed by the deposition and then cementation together of material which either eroded from older rocks or was produced biologically – sandstone, limestone and chalk are all examples. Igneous rocks such as granite, on the other hand, solidify from volcanic lava or magma still deep underground. And when sedimentary or igneous rocks are subjected to high temperatures and pressures – caught in the crunch of continental collisions or when magma intrudes up into them – they are transformed physically and chemically, becoming

Sedimentary rocks are formed by the deposition and then cementation together of material which either eroded from older rocks or was produced biologically – sandstone, limestone and chalk are all examples. Igneous rocks such as granite, on the other hand, solidify from volcanic lava or magma still deep underground. And when sedimentary or igneous rocks are subjected to high temperatures and pressures – caught in the crunch of continental collisions or when magma intrudes up into them – they are transformed physically and chemically, becoming a metamorphic rock like marble or slate.

To the timid traveler, fresh from the sedimentary levels of the lowlands, these highways, however picturesque and grand, seem terribly forbidding — cold, dead, gloomy gashes in the bones of the mountains, and of all Nature’s ways the ones to be most cautiously avoided. Yet they are full of the finest and most telling examples of Nature’s love; and though hard to travel, none are safer. For they lead through regions that lie far above the ordinary haunts of the devil, and of the pestilence that walks in darkness. True, there are innumerable places where the careless step will be the last step; and a rock falling from the cliffs may crush without warning like lightning from the sky; but what then? Accidents in the mountains are less common than in the lowlands, and these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilization. Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action. Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand.

In one form or another, calcium carbonate turns up everywhere—in coral reefs, in the pores of basalt, in the ooze at the bottom of the ocean. It’s the main component of limestone, which is one of the world’s most common sedimentary rocks. “There are vast amounts of limestone dust blowing around in the troposphere, where we live,” Keutsch observed. “So that makes it attractive. “It has near-ideal optical properties,” he went on. “It dissolves in acid. So I can say with certainty that it will not have the same ozone-depleting impact that sulfuric acid has.” Mathematical modeling has confirmed the mineral’s advantages, Keutsch told me. But until someone actually throws calcium carbonate into the stratosphere, it’s hard to know how much to trust the models. “There’s no other way around it,” he said. —

A mountain on Mars may have built up over time from lake sediments, according to NASA scientists who have been studying observations from the Curiosity rover scouring the Red Planet. The latest analysis is based on rocks discovered at the lower edges of Mount Sharp, which is located, rather oddly, in the midst of a crater on Earth’s neighbouring planet. While scientists are still not sure how long Mars was wet for any given spell through history, a “great surprise” was finding slanted rocks and soil that point to the existence of a lake bed in the crater, said Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology. Curiosity’s pictures and data collected from the Martian soil in the lowest sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp has helped scientists see the remnants of how rivers once carried sand and silt to the lake, depositing sediment at the mouth of the river. This process would have repeated itself again and again to form a delta. Billions of years ago, the planet is believed to have been much warmer, with a thicker atmosphere that would have supported liquid water and potentially some form of life. — AFP

As a philosophical hedonist, I am fully on board with the rock-n-roll defenders. It is true that, in our current age of neo-prohibition and general queasiness about risk, we desperately need to be clear about the simple joy of feeling good. In defending the functions of intoxicant use, let us never lose sight of one of the greatest contributions of intoxicants to human life: sheer hedonic pleasure. As Stuart Walton observes in his brilliant, wickedly funny cultural history of intoxication, Out of It,122 “There is a sedimentary layer of apologetics, of bashful, tittering euphemism, at the bottom of all talk about alcohol as an intoxicant that was laid down in the nineteenth century, which not even the liberal revolution of the 1960s quite managed to dislodge.

The Grand Canyon. It’s vast. So big you can’t imagine it until you’re standing at the edge of one of the rocky red cliffs, looking down. It’s not only deep, though, it’s wide, so wide you can’t see the other side. And long, too, like three hundred miles or something. There’s a river that snakes through the bottom, and incredible rock formations everywhere, and in the canyon walls, individual sedimentary layers where nearly two billion years of Earth’s history are exposed. It’s been inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years, and many of the tribes consider it a holy site. Because it looks and feels holy. Sacred and awe-inspiring, like a natural temple cut right into the earth.