{"quotes":[{"text":"The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it, and carries it further back into remote antiquity.","author":"Bal Gangadhar Tilak","tags":["archaeology","geology","history"],"id":4476,"author_id":"Bal+Gangadhar+Tilak"},{"text":"Push up some mountains. Cut them down. Drown the land under the sea. Push up some more mountains. Cut them down. Push up a third set of mountains, and let the river cut through them. “Unconformity” is the geologic term for an old, eroded land surface buried under younger rock layers. Put your outspread hand over the Carlin Canyon, Nevada unconformity and your fingers span roughly forty million years- the time that it took to bevel down the first set of mountains and deposit the younger layers on top. What is forty million years? Enough time for a small predatory dinosaur to evolve into a bird. Enough time for a four-legged, deer-like mammal to evolve into a whale. And far more than enough time to turn an ape-like creature in eastern Africa into a big-brained biped who can marvel at such things. The Grand Canyon’s Great Unconformity divides 1.7 billion-year-old rock from 550 million-year-old rock, a gap of more than one billion years. One billion years. I earn my salary studying the Earth and teaching its history, but I admit utter helplessness in comprehending such a span. A billion pages like those of this book would stack up more than forty miles. I had lived one bullion seconds a few days before my thirty-second birthday. A tape measure one billion inches long would stretch two-thirds of the way around the Earth. Such analogies hint at what deep time means- but they don’t get us there. “The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time,' John McPhee once observed, “it may only be able to measure it.","author":"Keith Meldahl","tags":["deep-time","erosion","evolution","geology","mountains","mystery","nature","wonder"],"id":8457,"author_id":"Keith+Meldahl"},{"text":"At present, a good many men engaged in scientific pursuits, and who have signally failed in gaining recognition among their fellows, are endeavoring to make reputations among the churches by delivering weak and vapid lectures upon the 'harmony of Genesis and Geology.' Like all hypocrites, these men overstate the case to such a degree, and so turn and pervert facts and words that they succeed only in gaining the applause of other hypocrites like themselves. Among the great scientists they are regarded as generals regard sutlers who trade with both armies.Surely the time must come when the wealth of the world will not be wasted in the propagation of ignorant creeds and miraculous mistakes. The time must come when churches and cathedrals will be dedicated to the use of man; when minister and priest will deem the discoveries of the living of more importance than the errors of the dead; when the truths of Nature will outrank the 'sacred' falsehoods of the past, and when a single fact will outweigh all the miracles of Holy Writ.Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth.","author":"Robert G. Ingersoll","tags":["applause","blessed","brave","cathedrals","church","churches","civilize","clergyman","creeds","dead","discoveries","elevate","enlighten","errors","fact","facts","failed","falsehoods","generals","genesis","geology","great","harmony","holy-writ","honest","hypocrites","ignorant","lectures","living","mankind","minister","miracles","miraculous","mistakes","money","nature","past","patriot","peers","perfert","philanthropist","philosopher","poet","priest","progress","pursuit","real","recognition","reputation","sacred","school","science","scientific","stlers","superstition","teacher","think","truth","university","use","vapid","waste","weak","wealth"],"id":14144,"author_id":"Robert+G.+Ingersoll"},{"text":"Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.","author":"Honoré de Balzac","tags":["baron-georges-cuvier","civilization","cuvier","discoverer","discovery","feeble","fossils","genius","geology","george-byron","george-gordon-byron","george-gordon-noel","george-gordon-noel-byron","georges-cuvier","historian","immensity","lord-byron","memory","mind","montmartre","natural","poet","poetry","science","space","time","treatise","turmoil","urals"],"id":16338,"author_id":"Honor%C3%A9+de+Balzac"},{"text":"For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them. Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them. Layers become history and, released from the enchanted sleep of eternity, life's motley, never-ending dance rises out of the black depths of the past into the light of the present.","author":"Hans Cloos","tags":["billions-of-years","earth","eternity","geology","history","life","light","man","past","patience","present","science","signs"],"id":23194,"author_id":"Hans+Cloos"},{"text":"The earth is large and old enough to teach us modesty.","author":"Hans Cloos","tags":["earth","geology","modesty","old","science","teach"],"id":28614,"author_id":"Hans+Cloos"},{"text":"That's the thing about rocks--they don't break easily. When I held them, I wanted to be like them-strong and steady, weathered but not broken.","author":"Ellen Dreyer","tags":["analogy","brave","break","broken","cave","experience","faith","geology","inspirational","life","motivational","rock","spelunking","steady","strength","strong","trauma","want","weather"],"id":33695,"author_id":"Ellen+Dreyer"},{"text":"Just ask any subjugated thing- a wife, population, race, deferred dream andresource misappropriated,  or continental plate; and it will tell you stories of inevitable fault linesof not-quite-stray bullets and strike slip boundaries,places where intensity builds and lets off small or great sparks,.","author":"Marie Anzalone","tags":["anger","geology","racism"],"id":36604,"author_id":"Marie+Anzalone"},{"text":"Each scenario is about fifteen million years into the future, and each assumes that the Pacific Plate will continue to move northwest at about 2.0 inches per year relative to the interior of North America.In scenario 1, the San Andreas fault is the sole locus of motion. Baja California and coastal California shear away from the rest of the continent to form a long, skinny island. A short ferry ride across the San Andreas Strait connects LA to San Francisco.In scenario 2, all of California west of the Sierra Nevada, together with Baja California, shears away to the northwest. The Gulf of California becomes the Reno Sea, which divides California from Nevada. The scene is reminiscent of how the Arabian Peninsula split from Africa to open the Red Sea some 5 million years ago.In scenario 3, central Nevada splits open through the middle of the Basin and Range province. The widening Gulf of Nevada divides the continent form a large island composed of Washington, Oregon, California, Baja California, and western Nevada. The scene is akin to Madagascar’s origin when it split form eastern Africa to open the Mozambique Channel.","author":"Keith Meldahl","tags":["california","deep-time","earth","geology","nature","plate-tectonics","wonder"],"id":45844,"author_id":"Keith+Meldahl"},{"text":"Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology.","author":"Thomas E. Woods Jr.","tags":["catholicism","geology","science","western-civilization"],"id":48668,"author_id":"Thomas+E.+Woods+Jr."}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":54,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}