Earth's History Quotes

I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.

Nature is reminding us that it used to exist without human beings.

The earth's history over the past several million years is that for every 100,000 years, we go through a dramatic climatic cycle where we get 90,000 years of ice age and 10,000 years of a warm period. I think people today just have the expectation that we deserve a perfectly benign climate forever.

Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain.

There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.

We may affirm of Mr. Buffon, that which has been said of the chemists of old; though he may have failed in attaining his principal aim, of establishing a theory, yet he has brought together such a multitude of facts relative to the history of the earth, and the nature of its fossil productions, that curiosity finds ample compensation, even while it feels the want of conviction.

In fourth grade, I was interested in all areas of science. I particularly loved learning about how the earth was created.

In recent years, our planet has been warming at an alarming rate and seen record-breaking temperatures. We are now witnessing the sixth mass extinction event in the earth's geologic history. Our sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, threatening our largest cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we're, like, half a step on the stairwell - the timeline for us on this planet.

The older the layers, the more each of them is uniform over a great extent; the newer the layers, the more they are limited and subject to variation within small distances.

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.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

In the last 680 million years of the four and a half billion that this planet has existed, life has been determined by two principal forces: the warmth and the diffused energy of the sunlight coming through our atmosphere, and water. Those are the primordial forces of life - sunlight and water.

The earth is, like our own skin, fated to carry the scars of ancient wounds.

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

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.

Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs.

Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.

Certainly paleontologists have found samples of an extremely small fraction, only, of the earth's extinct species, and even for groups that are most readily preserved and found as fossils they can never expect to find more than a fraction.

The field of the Geologist's inquiry is the Globe itself, ... [and] it is his study to decipher the monuments of the mighty revolutions and convulsions it has suffered.

What I'm interested in is the conversations going on about the Anthropocene and what it means to view ourselves as a part of Earth's geological history.

Geological age plays the same part in our views of the duration of the universe as the Earth's orbital radius does in our views of the immensity of space.

Continents may break up, continents may emerge, but the human race is immortal in its origin and in its growth, and there is nothing to be afraid of, even if the foundations of the earth be moved.

Is uniformitarianism necessary?

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.