Structural Geology Quotes

Natural selection acts only by the preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure.

modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure.

In reality, a river's basic shape... is not a line but a tree. A river is, in its essence, a thing that branches... Although it flows inward toward its trunk, in geological time it grew, and continues to grow, outward, like an organism, from its ocean outlet to its many headwaters. In the vernacular of a new science, it is fractal, its structure echoing itself on all scales, from river to stream to brook to creek to rivulet, branches too small to name and too many to count.

Our tree’s only source of energy is the sun: after light photons stimulate the pigments within the leaf, buzzing electrons line up into an unfathomably long chain and pass their excitement one to the other, moving biochemical energy across the cell to the exact location where it is needed. The plant pigment chlorophyll is a large molecule, and within the bowl of its spoon-shaped structure sits one single precious magnesium atom. The amount of magnesium needed for enough chlorophyll to fuel thirty-five pounds of leaves is equivalent to the amount of magnesium found in fourteen One A Day vitamins, and it must ultimately dissolve out of bedrock, which is a geologically slow process.

My night stand is more like a geological structure: a bunch of books piled on the floor with its own strata.

In using the present in order to reveal the past, we assume that the forces in the world are essentially the same through all time; for these forces are based on the very nature of matter, and could not have changed. The ocean has always had its waves, and those waves have always acted in the same manner. Running water on the land has ever had the same power of wear and transportation and mathematical value to its force. The laws of chemistry, heat, electricity, and mechanics have been the same through time. The plan of living structures has been fundamentally one, for the whole series belongs to one system, as much almost as the parts of an animal to the one body; and the relations of life to light and heat, and to the atmosphere, have ever been the same as now.

After Us, the Salamanders!, The Future belongs to the Newts, Newts Mean Cultural Revolution. Even if they don't have their own art (they explained) at least they are not burdened with idiotic ideals, dried up traditions and all the rigid and boring things taught in schools and given the name of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy and culture in any of its forms. The word culture is senile and it makes us sick. Human art has been with us for too long and is worn-out and if the newts have never fallen for it we will make a new art for them. We, the young, will blaze the path for a new world of salamandrism: we wish to be the first newts, we are the salamanders of tomorrow! And so the young poetic movement of salamandrism was born, triton - or tritone - music was composed and pelagic painting, inspired by the shape world of jellyfish, fish and corals, made its appearance. There were also the water regulating structures made by the newts themselves which were discovered as a new source of beauty and dignity. We've had enough of nature, the slogans went; bring on the smooth, concrete shores instead of the old and ragged cliffs! Romanticism is dead; the continents of the future will be outlined with clean straight lines and re-shaped into conic sections and rhombuses; the old geological must be replaced with a world of geometry. In short, there was once again a new trend that was to be the thing of the future, a new aesthetic sensation and new cultural manifestoes; anyone who failed to join in with the rise of salamandrism before it was too late felt bitterly that he had missed his time, and he would take his revenge by making calls for the purity of mankind, a return to the values of the people and nature and other reactionary slogans. A concert of tritone music was booed off the stage in Vienna, at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris a pelagic painting called Capriccio en Bleu was slashed by an unidentified perpetrator; salamandrism was simply victorious, and its rise was unstoppable.

The life of a region depends ultimately on its geologic substratum, for this sets up a chain-reaction which passes, determining their character, in turn through its streams and wells, its vegetation and the animal-life that feeds on this, and finally through the type of human being attracted to live there. In a profound sense also the structure of its rocks gives rise to the psychic life of the land: granite, serpentine, slate, sandstone, limestone, chalk and the rest have each their special personality dependant on the age in which they were laid down, each being co-existent with a special phase of the earth-spirit's manifestation.

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.

Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history's ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as the lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life.

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.

As if the girl of seventeen had remained undestroyed by experience - like some deeper layer in a geological structure which had been pressed but not obliterated by the new layers.

On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events. The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception—and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality. The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.

Bone beds turn up sporadically elsewhere, with spectacular examples in the Dinosaur National Monument in the USA and in Mongolia’s Gobi desert. In eastern England there are several within the early Cretaceous strata, which include, as well as bones, structures termed coprolites, some of which represent the petrified faeces of dinosaurs or marine reptiles. In the middle of the 19th century, when England’s population was booming and the farmers were struggling to feed everybody, it was discovered that these fragments (which, being bone, are phosphate-rich) made a superb fertilizer when crushed and acid-treated. A thriving and highly profitable industry formed to quarry away these ‘coprolite beds’. Some considerable figures were involved in this industry. John Henslow, Charles Darwin’s beloved mentor of his time at Cambridge, seems to have first encouraged the farmers of eastern England to use such fossil manure. William Buckland also became involved. An extraordinary combination of early savant of geology at Oxford and Dean of Westminster, he was the first to scientifically describe a dinosaur ( Megalosaurus); carried out his fieldwork in academic gown; reputedly ate his way through the entire animal kingdom; and coined the term ‘coprolite’, using these petrified droppings to help reconstruct the ecology of ancient animals. Later, he energetically collaborated with the celebrated German chemist Justus Liebig (who had worked out how to chemically treat these fossil phosphates to make fertilizer) to show how they could be used by agriculturalists, once demonstrating their efficacy by exhibiting, in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, a turnip, a yard in circumference, that he had grown with such prehistoric assistance. It is related strata (geologically rare phosphate-rich deposits, usually biologically formed) that are still a mainstay—if a rapidly depleting one—of modern agriculture. In a very real sense, these particular rocks are keeping us all alive.

Many of the other megalithic works at Machu Pic'chu show large gaps as in the two previous photos. The width of these gaps is very similar, and again suggest that a massive earthquake cataclysm, moving in a east-west direction, affected the site in the very distant past [...]. A geologist who inspected this with the author stated quite emphatically that such a drop would not have been the result of poor foundation work when the structure was made, but far more likely, again, the result of a catastrophic earthquake. She also stated that such an earthquake would have caused the rough stone and clay mortar buildings to be completely demolished. This, then, clearly indicates that the megalithic core of Machu Pic'chu, which comprises about 5-10 percent, is older than the Inca, and may in fact have been made prior to the cataclysmic event of about 12,000 years ago.

By accelerating the process of the growth of metals, the metallurgist was precipitating temporal growth: geological tempo was by him changed to living tempo. This bold conception, whereby man defends his full responsibility vis-a-vis Nature, already gives us a glimpse of something of the work of the alchemist.

The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception – and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality.

The story of the Eridania Basin and the possible scientific promise it holds was pieced together by using the results from different instruments on different spacecraft over many years, spanning several scientific disciplines: geology, chemistry, spectroscopy, laser altitude ranging and photography. The estimate of the age of the surface required the Apollo lunar rock samples from 50 years ago, and radiometric dating techniques which require an understanding of nuclear physics. The estimate of the age of the surface requires a model of the entire Solar System in order to interpret the measured crater density, which illustrates another important idea. The Solar System is a system; no planet is an island; no planet can be understood in isolation, just as the structure of any one living thing on Earth cannot be understood in isolation. Organisms are a product of evolution by natural selection, the interaction of the expression of genetic mutations and mixing with other organisms, in the ecosystem and the wider environment. The planets formed in a chaotic maelstrom from motions as random as the impact of a cosmic ray on a strand of primordial DNA, and whatever worlds emerged from the chaos have had their histories shaped profoundly by their mutual interactions throughout their evolution; the Late Heavy Bombardment is a beautiful example.