Geology Quotes

A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the bottom.

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

The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically "sudden" origins at single bedding planes.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

My father was a soil scientist with the Geological Survey.

I've got no problem with anybody's religion. But if you go claiming the Earth is only 10,000 years old, that's just wrong.

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

The enormous consumption of coals in the arts and manufactures, and in steam navigation, has excited the fears of ... exhaustion of our mines. These apprehensions, however, may be allayed by the assurance [of] the highest mining and geological authorities, that the coal fields of Northumberland and Durham alone are sufficient to supply [the present demand] for 1700 years, and ... the great coal basin of South Wales will ... supply the same demand for 2000 years longer.

I was the kind of kid who liked omnivorously almost all kinds of science - rock collections, fossils - and I like leaves, I like plants, and I like biology.

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

I love watching programs about Discovery Channel and just reading New Scientist, and all that kind of stuff. Im just fascinated by it.

So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology.

When I moved out here to California, I became obsessed with geology. It's impossible not to be interested in the earth if you live in a place like this. I started to read a lot of geology, much to the horror of my friends.

Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.

Incontestably, the great centres of population in the primeval ages were the chalklands, and next to them those of limestone. The chalk first, for it furnished man with flints, and the limestone next when he had learned to barter.

Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

My favorite book is 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.

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?

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you'd hit this molten mess in about an hour. It's called the asthenosphere - a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth's cool epidermis - the so-called tectonic plates.

Even the continents drift.