Geologist Quotes

Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized is how one geologist put it to me. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

There are some geologists involved with prospecting for oil and other hidden resources who can pick up a rock and say, 'Yes, there's oil under there.' A geologist who has been studying those kinds of rocks for 10 or 20 years is able to make that pronouncement. ~ Christopher Alexander

Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you'll find them. ~ Sam Kean

published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. Today ~ Bill Bryson

The age of the earth was thus increased from a mere score of millions [of years] to a thousand millions and more, and the geologist who had before been bankrupt in time now found himself suddenly transformed into a capitalist with more millions in the bank than he knew how to dispose of ... More cautious people, like myself, too cautious, perhaps, are anxious first of all to make sure that the new [radioactive] clock is not as much too fast as Lord Kelvin's was too slow. ~ William Johnson Sollas

The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist. ~ John Ruskin

According to geologists, about 100 million years from now, Asia and the Americas will smash together to form one giant supercontinent. The good news: Maybe all those jobs that went over there will finally come back. ~ Jay Leno

As a geologist, I love Earth observations, but it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a 'consensus' that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. 'Consensus,' as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. ~ Harrison Schmitt

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. ~ Bal Gangadhar Tilak

I used to dig around the sandbox and pull out pieces of coal and show them to my mother, and she used to say that's how I must have known I was going to be a geologist. ~ Richard Mourdock

On each of two porches lie big chunks of serpentine - smooth as talc, mottled black and green. When you see rocks like that on a porch, a geologist is inside. ~ John McPhee

The best way to study Mars is with two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars ... and then on the surface. ~ Buzz Aldrin

Finding oil is a multidisciplinary science. You need a lot of people - statisticians, engineers, and geologists, of course. And what I have learned in the past 30 years is that I read people better than I read books. ~ Eike Batista

I did a film when I was about 30; it's a coming of age story called 'Gas Food Lodging,' and I'm so proud of that little independent film. I play this young English geologist, and he's such a simple, loving kind of guy. Doesn't talk too much. He's just a quiet guy, and he gets the girl. ~ Robert Knepper

One of the most important things about the geology on the moon is your descriptions of what you see, comparing them to things that you've seen on Earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground would know what you're talking about; and then take pictures of them. ~ Eugene Cernan

I'm a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That's what I've done in my career, one that's culminated in - at least to this point - playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That's the Bakken field, which I believe will yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come, maybe more. ~ Harold Hamm

I wasn't looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man - a geologist, an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention. ~ Linda McCartney

It became apparent to enthusiasts of locomotive travel that there was at least one unscheduled train on the tracks of Palimpsest. It did not stop at any of the stations, for one thing. Astrologers and geologists were consulted; they are much the same folk in this part of the world. The astrologer gazes upward and scries out shapes in the sky, and to do this he builds great towers so as to be closest to the element of his choice. The geologist is an astrologer who once, just once, happened to look down. From such great heights she glimpses the enormous shapes stamped on the earth, the long polygons made by the borders of farms and rivers and mill towns, littoral masses and city walls, a reflection of the celestial mosaic. In these loamy constellations Palimpsest is but a decorative flourish; they are so vast and complex that in her lifetime the geologist may chart but the tiniest part of the conterration which contains her tower. It is a long and lonely life to which few are called. ~ Catherynne M Valente

It seems so ridiculous to me,' he said, 'that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean like the suit of clothes of an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can't ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself may seem overblown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pridefulness ... ~ Alice Munro

I suggest that the best geologist is he who has seen most rocks. ~ Herbert Harold Read

The enthusiasm geologists show for adding new words to their conversation is, if anything, exceeded by their affection for the old. They are not about to drop 'granite.' They say 'granodiorite' when they are in church and 'granite' the rest of the week. ~ John McPhee

The geologist, six years ago now, hadn't defied anything to climb the hill. He'd had his own powerful magic
the ordinary magic that extraordinarily interested people always have. ~ Elizabeth Knox

The long, slow turn of world-time as the geologist has known it, and the invisibly moving hour hand of evolution perceived only yesterday by the biologist, have given way in the human realm to a fantastically accelerated social evolution induced by industrial technology. So fast does this change progress that a growing child strives to master the institutional customs of a society which, compared with the pace of past history, compresses centuries of change into his lifetime. I myself, like others of my generation, was born in an age which has already perished. At my death I will look my last upon a nation which, save for some linguistic continuity, will seem increasingly alien and remote. It will be as though I peered upon my youth through misty centuries. I will not be merely old; I will be a genuine fossil embedded in onrushing man-made time before my actual death. ~ Loren Eiseley

Look, I don't know what you are, but you're more than a geologist, if you are one at all. I've met lots of geologists on different projects like this, and they're all tiny sunburned men with fetishes for geodes. They wear floppy hats and carry baggies for soil samples around with them ... And geologists don't make rocks disappear like you did the other night. They keep them and build little shrines to them. ~ Kevin Hearne

I'm here to present my findings at the symposium. I'm an esteemed member of the Society, with an impressive record of scholarship, and I have something of value to contribute to these proceedings. I also happen to be female. I'm a woman who knows a great deal about rocks. I suggest you find the stones to deal with it. ~ Tessa Dare

For the stone from the top for geologists, the knowledge of the limits of endurance for the doctors, but above all for the spirit of adventure to keep alive the soul of man. ~ George Mallory

Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means. ~ Charles Lapworth

Geologists have a saying - rocks remember. ~ Neil Armstrong

All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years. ~ Richard Dawkins

Geologists have usually had recourse for the explanation of these changes to the supposition of sundry violent and extraordinary catastrophes, cataclysms, or general revolutions having occurred in the physical state of the earth's surface. ~ George Julius Poulett Scrope

Nobody knows the age of the Sphinx. There are those who claim that it is far older than the four thousand years attributed to it by conventional thinking. They have interesting reasons. First, it has been weathered, according to geologists, by the action of water, not wind. This fact is revealed by the condition of its sandstone body. According to John Anthony West, it must have been built long before the time of the pharaohs because it shows evidence of water erosion. Dr. Robert Schoch, a Boston University geologist, has confirmed the validity of this theory, and his dating was endorsed by three hundred other geologists at the 1992 convention of the Geological Society of America. ~ Whitley Strieber

Establishment. In 1966, the Dutch geologist M. G. Rutten could write, in a charmingly antiquated style that has passed forever from the scientific journals: ~ Nick Lane

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights. ~ Bill Bryson

Geologists are rapidly becoming convinced that the mammals spread from their central Asian point of origin largely because of great variations in climate. ~ Ellsworth Huntington

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem. ~ Walt Whitman

The earliest signs of living things, announcing as they do a high complexity of organization, entirely exclude the hypothesis of a transmutation from lower to higher grades of being. The first fiat of Creation which went forth, doubtlessly ensured the perfect adaptation of animals to the surrounding media; and thus, whilst the geologist recognizes a beginning, he can see in the innumerable facts of the eye of the earliest crustacean, the same evidences of Omniscience as in the completion of the vertebrate form. ~ Roderick Murchison

Climate has always changed. It always has and always will. Sea level has always changed. Ice sheets come and go. Life always changes. Extinctions of life are normal. Planet Earth is dynamic and evolving. Climate changes are cyclical and random. Through the eyes of a geologist, I would be really concerned if there were no change to Earth over time. In the light of large rapid natural climate changes, just how much do humans really change climate? ~ Ian Plimer

As geology is essentially a historical science, the working method of the geologist resembles that of the historian. This makes the personality of the geologist of essential importance in the way he analyzes the past. ~ Reinout Willem Van Bemmelen

[The] subjective [historical] element in geologic studies accounts for two characteristic types that can be distinguished among geologists: one considering geology as a creative art, the other regarding geology as an exact science. ~ Reinout Willem Van Bemmelen

Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have never met a geologist or leading scientist who believes adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will have any significant effect on climate change. ~ Gina Rinehart

Ah!" I cried, springing up. "But no! no! My uncle shall never know it. He would insist upon doing it too. He would want to know all about it. Ropes could not hold him, such a determined geologist as he is! He would start, he would, in spite of everything and everybody, and he would take me with him, and we should never get back. No, never! never!" My over-excitement was beyond all description. ~ Jules Verne

My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana, and he remembered riding his horse across the prairie and seeing some large bones sticking out of the ground. He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty good notion that they were dinosaur bones. ~ Jack Horner

Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

My dad was a geologist and my mum was a nurse who directed amateur theatrics. ~ Matthew Goode

No true geologist holds by the development hypothesis;-it has been resigned to sciolists and smatterers;-and there is but one other alternative. They began to be, through the miracle of creation. From the evidence furnished by these rocks we are shut down either to belief in miracle, or to something else infinitely harder of reception, and as thoroughly unsupported by testimony as it is contrary to experience. Hume is at length answered by the severe truths of the stony science. ~ Hugh Miller

Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to all other parts of the globe, yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so. ~ Herbert Spencer

We are headed to a radically new Earth, at least from our perspective. But from the planet's perspective, this is nothing new. As the geologist Peter Ward is fond of pointing out, we are actually heading back to a time kind of like the Miocene. The Miocene ended about 5.5 million years ago, and it was the last time that the planet had no icecaps. ~ Annalee Newitz

[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller's works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes's "Seaside Studies," will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who kno ~ Herbert Spencer