#geology

The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in a warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone. ↗

— John McPhee

#science #wonder #science

Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology. ↗

— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

#geology #science #western-civilization #catholicism

Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to. ↗

— Octavia Butler

#about #anthropology #astronomy #fun #geology

One of the most important things about the geology on the moon is your descriptions of what you see, comparing them to things that you've seen on Earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground would know what you're talking about; and then take pictures of them. ↗

— Gene Cernan

#comparing #descriptions #earth #geologists #geology

My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the 'National Geographic.' ↗

— Joseph Murray

#each #genetics #geographic #geology #i

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#outdoors #science #nature

So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#affairs #development #geology #ground #happens

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#humor #perspective #time #age

There is no thrill like the thrill of discovery; no life like the life of a mining camp in the days of its youth. Nevada had known them in full and overflowing measure. The salt of the sea in the blood of a sailor is but a weak and insipid condiment compared with the solution of cyanide, sage and silicate in the blood of the prospector. ↗

— C.B. Glasscock

#life

Look, I don't know what you are, but you're more than a geologist, if you are one at all. I've met lots of geologists on different projects like this, and they're all tiny sunburned men with fetishes for geodes. They wear floppy hats and carry baggies for soil samples around with them. ... And geologists don't make rocks disappear like you did the other night. They keep them and build little shrines to them. ↗

— Kevin Hearne

#geologist #geologists #geology #science #scientists