Ellsworth Huntington Quotes

The States which form the northern border of the United States westward from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast include an area several times larger than France and could contain ten Englands and still have room to spare.

We must in imagination sweep off the drifted matter that clogs the surface of the ground; we must suppose all the covering of moss and heath and wood to be torn away from the sides of the mountains, and the green mantle that lies near their feet to be lifted up; we may then see the muscular integuments, and sinews, and bones of our mother Earth, and so judge of the part played by each of them during those old convulsive movements whereby her limbs were contorted and drawn up into their present posture.

Most of the Amazon basin is as flat as a pancake and laced with extravagantly meandering waterways. One school of thought holds that more than 145 million years ago, when Africa and South America were joined, the Amazon's main stem was connected to the Niger River and actually flowed in the opposite direction, toward the Pacific Ocean.

If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you'd hit this molten mess in about an hour. It's called the asthenosphere - a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth's cool epidermis - the so-called tectonic plates.

As soon as the news of the Cabot voyages reached the King of Portugal he arranged to send an expedition of discovery to the far north-west, perhaps to find a northern sea route to Eastern Asia.

Western Australia is covered by granite, the largest single piece of Achaean rock that still lies on the surface of the, of, of the Earth, that's 2.5 to 2.9 billion years old. It's one of the most ancient and intact bits of the Earth's crust.

Unfortunately, we haven't found many very old rocks on Earth because our planet's surface is constantly renewed by plate tectonics, coupled with erosion.

The sediments of the past are many miles in collective thickness: yet the feeble silt of the rivers built them all from base to summit.

Economic activity is moving from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean... Russia has a certain natural advantage because it also borders the Pacific Ocean.

First, to begin with, Mexico is North American; the one that is using wrong the term is United States. United States is not North America. North America is Mexico, United States, and Canada.

There is no community of interests or of principles between North and South America.

Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, 1793

The President [Thomas Jefferson] has been all his life a man of letters, very speculative and a lover of glory, and it would be possible he might attempt to perpetuate the fame of his administration … by discovering … the way by which Americans may some day extend their population and their influence up to the Pacific Ocean

From the Rio Grande to the Arctic Ocean there should be but one flag and one country.

From sea to sea

Great improvements must also take place which far surpass the momentum of power that a single nation can produce, but will with facility proceed from their united strength. The hand of art will change the face of the universe. Mountains, deserts, and oceans will feel its mighty force. It will not then be debated whether hills shall be prostrated, but whether the Alps and the Andes shall be leveled; nor whether sterile fields shall be fertilized, but whether the deserts of Africa shall feel the power of cultivation; nor whether rivers shall be joined, but whether the Caspian shall see the Mediterranean, and the waves of the Pacific lave the Atlantic.

The portion of the naval force of the Union in actual service has been chiefly employed on three stations -- the Mediterranean, the coasts of South America bordering on the Pacific Ocean, and the West Indies

All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess

Let us suppose, that the Old and New worlds were formerly but one continent, and that, by a violent earthquake, the ancient Atlantis of Plato was sunk ... The sea would necessarily rush in from all quarters, and form what is now called the Atlantic ocean.

Gulf Stream

Even a child, if he looks at a map of the world, can point out that the Indonesian archipelago forms one unity. On the map, there can be shown a unity of the group of islands between two great oceans - the Pacific Ocean and the Indies Ocean - and between two continents - the continent of Asia and the continent of Australia.

Like a mountain that's growing.

The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic - have always blown on free men.

I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.