Geological Formation Quotes

Mount Harris is of basaltic formation, but I could not observe any columnar regularity in it, although large blocks are exposed above the ground. The rock is extremely hard and sonorous.

I believe in science and evolution. I've been to the Grand Canyon.

As I am writing, another illustration of ye generation of hills proposed above comes into my mind. Milk is as uniform a liquor as ye chaos was. If beer be poured into it & ye mixture let stand till it be dry, the surface of ye curdled substance will appear as rugged & mountanous as the Earth in any place.

The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.

The natural formation of the country is the soldier's best ally

Strictly speaking, the land does not exist; it is merely dehydrated sea.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

The Colorado River did not form the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was formed as the flood went down.

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?

In fact, just about all the major natural attractions you find in the West- the Grand Canyon, the Badlands, the Goodlands, the Mediocrelands, the Rocky Mountains and Robert Redford- were caused by erosion.

Mountains have been formed by one [or other] of the causes of the formation of stone, most probably from agglutinative clay which slowly dried and petrified during ages of which we have no record. It seems likely that this habitable world was in former days uninhabitable and, indeed, submerged beneath the ocean. Then, becoming exposed little by little, it petrified in the course of ages.

Well, once you've been in the Canyon and once you've sort of fallen in love with it, it never ends...it's always been a fascinating place to me, in fact I've often said that if I ever had a mistress it would be the Grand Canyon.

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.

There was a rock in front of my hut, a tall, gray rock. By its looks it seemed to be well-disposed toward me.

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.

As for the flood carving Grand Canyon, why don't they explain to us why the top of the Canyon is 4,000ft higher than where the river (Colorado River) enters the canyon? Why don't they explain to us how rivers miraculously flowed up-hill for millions of years to finally cut the groove deep enough so they could flow downhill?

One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.

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.

Petroleum is the product of a distillation from great depth and issues from the primitive rocks beneath which the forces of all volcanic action lie.

The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.

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 Peninsula is what we have and there is no more where it came from.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

But to carve the Grand Canyon, Earth required millions of years. To excavate Meteor Crater, the universe, using a sixty-thousand-ton asteroid traveling upward of twenty miles per second, required a fraction of a second. No offense to Grand Canyon lovers, but for my money, Meteor Crater is the most amazing natural landmark in the world.