Charles Lyell Quotes

People have said I belong in a rubber room because I look for wrecks, and when I find them, I just do a survey. I don't look for treasure or artifacts.

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.

We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans.

The traces of upheavals become more impressive when one moves a little higher, when one gets even closer to the foot of the great mountain ranges. There are still plenty of shell layers. We notice them, even thicker and more solid ones.

There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers.

Shipwrecks are incredible mysteries.

NUMA is basically trying to preserve our maritime heritage by finding lost shipwrecks of historical significance before they are gone.

The deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it.

The Graveyard of the Atlantic exhibit reflects the aquarium's proximity to the state's Outer Banks, where thousands of ships have run aground over the centuries. Divers in the exhibit carry on a conversation with visitors outside the tank.

We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.

I came to explore the wreck.

Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?

Entire new continent can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the DMV.

In my youth,geology was nervously striving to accommodate itself to Genesis. Now it is Genesis that is striving to accommodate itself to geology.

In the course of time I have learned to tramp about coral reefs, twenty to thirty feet under water, so unconcernedly that I can pay attention to particular definite things. But after all my silly fears have been allayed, even now, with eyes overflowing with surfeit of color, I am still almost inarticulate. We need a whole new vocabulary, new adjectives, adequately to describe the designs and colors of under sea.

We'd been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean.

America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the Far West.

Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact — that mystery of mysteries — the first appearance of new beings on this earth.

It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to ascertain, with the utmost certainty, that our earth has not always been covered over by the same external crust, because we are thoroughly assured that the organized bodies to which these fossil remains belong must have lived upon the surface before they came to be buried, as they now are, at a great depth.

There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in, Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.

I'm a curious guy. I can't turn away from an investigative story, when it comes to the forensic analysis. I've done 33 dives, to the titanic wreck site. I've spent over 50 hours piloting robotic vehicles at that wreck trying to piece together what happened during the disaster. How the ship broke up, comparing the historical record with the forensic record. Documentaries are kind of my new life. I love documentary filmmaking.

Palaeontological research exhibits, beyond question, the phenomenon of provinces in time, as well as provinces in space. Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.

Our climate is changing. The Earth's climate has, in fact, warmed by 1.1 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial revolution. People look at this and say: Oh, that is not very much. In fact, it is very much, and it changes the dynamic. It impacts species. It kills some. It diminishes the carbon sink of the ocean. It does a number of things.

I am convinced, by repeated observation, that marbles, lime-stones, chalks, marls, clays, sand, and almost all terrestrial substances, wherever situated, are full of shells and other spoils of the ocean.