Seth Shostak Quotes

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 Dolomites are the most beautiful rock mountains in the world, but in a few million years they will just be desert.

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.

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.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

Thus it cannot be denied that the masses which today form our highest mountains were originally in a liquid state; for a long time they were covered by waters which did not sustain any life.

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

We're stunned by the diversity of rocks. This stuff looks like it was put into a blender.

There are two kinds of stones, as everyone knows, one of which rolls.

But the revolutions and changes which are responsible for the present state of the earth are not limited to the upsetting of the ancient strata and to the ebbing of the sea after the formations of new layers.

The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete bodies in the strata, tells us either that the layer itself which carries them was in earlier times dry land or that dry land was at least formed in the immediate area.

I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.

England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

All the lessons are in nature. You look at the way rocks are formed - the wind and the water hitting them, shaping them, making them what they are. Things take time, you know?

Do not doubt that mountains walk simply because they may not appear to walk like humans.

Even the continents drift.

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?

A rill in a barnyard and the Grand Canyon represent, in the main, stages of valley erosion that began some millions of years apart.

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.

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.

In my junior year, I studied geology on Saturday mornings at the Museum of Natural History. Mineralogy has always been a major interest.

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.