Tectonic Activity Quotes

Some areas near Dallas experienced a 3.5-magnitude earthquake, which some blame on fracking. However, scientists say that it was more likely aftershocks from Chris Christie celebrating at the Cowboys game.

Plate tectonics is not all havoc and destruction. The slow movement of continents and ocean floors recycles carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans back into the atmosphere. Without this slow speed carbon cycle, Earth's temperatures would cool dozens of degrees below your comfort zone.

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

We haven't seen a real volcanic event at least in 74,000 years - [Mount Toba] in Indonesia, in Sumatra, where the crater itself is 100 kilometers across. It was so monumental, what happened, that for a very long time the entire atmosphere of our planet was darkened. It's not the lava and the heat per se; it's the obscuring of the entire atmosphere, and it made it very difficult for the human race to survive.

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.

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.

Only fools, liars, and charlatans predict earthquakes

All life on Earth is subject to the rumbles and rockings of the parent stucture which has no control over the disastrous effects of its stresses and strains on whatever thrives on its surface. The ambitions and dreams of men are irrelevant to this planetary giant which pursues its own way in its own manner. Man is its child, tenant and still, to this date, its captive.

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?

The prime feature in Cornish geology is the upheaval of the granite, distorting, folding back, and altering the superincumbent beds.

At the same time, there's something magnificent about volcanoes; they created the atmosphere that we need for breathing.

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 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.

Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of our planet.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

Planets that don't currently sport plate tectonics, such as Venus and Mars, are scarcely habitable. Tectonics might be a requirement of any world that aspires to a rich diversity of life.

We trace out all the veins of the earth, and yet, living upon it, undermined as it is beneath our feet, are astonished that it should occasionally cleave asunder or tremble: as though, forsooth, these signs could be any other than expressions of the indignation felt by our sacred parent!

The most exciting thing that we have found with Cassini is the geological activity, the geysering activity at the south pole of Enceladus.

Like a mountain that's growing.

It's a fault line where the flotsam and energy that washes up from the Pacific collides with all of urban America crashing in from the other direction.

What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?

Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.