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Geological Time Quotes

Browse 27 quotes about Geological Time.

Geological Time Quotes

“Unkar Delta at Mile 73 The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke’s description of “raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet.” Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified.”

NatureBeautyLandscapeProseColorsGeologyLyricalNational ParksGrand CanyonGeological TimeColorado RiverDeep TimeRiver Running
Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“Time changed for the Romantics. Whether from the rise of industrialism that made visible the accelerating edge of the Anthropocene, from the contrasting awareness of geological time, the effects of accurate time-keeping, or the collapse of time and space made possible by steam travel, their period's momentum seemed resolutely forward, while at the same time operating 'in widely varying scales, paces and planes'. That change came early for Scots, who numbered among them Watt, of the steam engine (1765), and Hutton, who published the seminal Theory of the Earth (1788). For Walter Scott, who belonged to the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1810 and served as its President from 1820, that society having published Hutton's theory, and who knew Watt personally, time's many turns would have been particularly evident.”

TimeRomanticismGeological TimeWalter ScottAnthropoceneJames WattJames Hutton
Book:The International Companion to the Scottish Novel
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“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.”

LongProcessViewsTheoryStandardsOrdinaryClaimsTraditionalRecognitionRadicalPlanesResolveMisunderstoodSequenceEquilibriumLife SpanSudden ChangeBeddingGeological TimeSpeciation
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material, from which they are derived, or in the laws, governing their formation.”

HumansBodyLawFieldsMaterialsStartingPhysicsSeparationAtmosphereComplexityDistributionComponentsUnlikelyHuman BodyParticlesLiving ThingsGoverningFormationLaws Of PhysicsGeological Time
Author:Kurt Gödel
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“On the geological time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about deep time. ... Geologists ... see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the Earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s across the sky ... Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.”

ThinkingHumansEarthRaceGoneSeeingSkyLifetimeSpeciesScalesEvolveIslandsDirtUnbelievableEmphasisFlingBrevityTropicalGeologistSwiftnessGeological TimeTropical Islands
Author:John McPhee
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“How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on Brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?”

ThinkingMenChristianScienceHateAnimalTreeSeaCreationHe ManPrideEvolutionProudCoupleCapableGardenI HateFellowsFishesUglyJealousMagnificentEmphasisWormsBrutesApesEdenDinosaursAncestryKinshipJellyGarden Of EdenGeological Time
Book:The Journal of a Disappointed Man
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“The grounds on which golf is played are called links, being the barren sandy soil from which the sea has retired in recent geological times. In their natural state links are covered with long, rank bent grass and gorse. Links are too barren for cultivation: but sheep, rabbits, geese and professionals pick up a precarious livelihood on them.”

LongStatesNaturalSeaPicksGolfGrassSoilLinksCoveredSheepBentRetiredRabbitsGeeseBarrenLivelihoodCultivationPrecariousSandyGeological Time
Author:Charles Walter Simpson
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“They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.”

WayTryingEyeEarthGrowsTermGrowing UpHappenedEventsComfortHappeningsInsignificantBlinkGrapplingGeological Time
Book:The God of Small Things
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“Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.”

PeopleYearsHumansChildrenLittlesAbleBlackAnimalMillionsImagineMinutesGrewGrew UpSeasonsDiedPreparedEverydayDecadesScalesHuman LifeApplesBrownLengthGrantsHuman ExperienceEightyCompostGeological Time
Book:Michael Crichton's Jurassic World
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“Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.”

HandsPurposeCoursesIndividualForeverSurvivalMachinesCastsPartnersCardsDestroyedMarchGenesStableFleetingOblivionCrossingsShufflingChromosomesCrossing OverGeological Time
Book:The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition
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“Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny.”

IfsLifeDoeIndividualEvolutionIntegrityGainsCapacityCloudsMetaphorPopulationProtectionScalesLocalsPassingPassingsDesertBordersSufficientAppropriateUnitsSelectionTransientPanoramaGeological TimeSpeciation
Book:Punctuated Equilibrium
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“I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,-this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.”

MayDifferentDoneWholeScienceFoundGrowthNatureResultsStudyGroupsStageEvolutionFishesSentencesWhole LifeConclusionEggsDevotedSuccessionGeologyCorrespondenceSingle SentenceGeological Time
Book:Agassiz on Evolution: Methods of study in natural history
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“If we strike a line to the N.W. from Sydney to Wellington Valley, we shall find that little change takes place in the geological features of the country.”

IfsLittlesCountryChangeLinesStrikesFeaturesValleysSydneyWellingtonGeological Time
Book:Two expeditions into the interior of Southern Australia: during the years 1828, 1829, 1830 and 1831 with observations on ... New South Wales
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“Palaeontological research exhibits, beyond question, the phenomenon of provinces in time, as well as provinces in space. Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.”

WellsSpaceExistenceTeachOceanResearchRemainsSpeciesPhenomenonExplorationDefiniteExhibitsProvincesCentralizationOcean ExplorationGeological TimeGeologic Time
Book:The Natural History of the European Seas...
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