No. 65
Reading these grand mountain
manuscripts displayed through every vicissitude of heat and cold, calm
and storm, upheaving volcanoes and down-grinding glaciers, we see that
everything in Nature called destruction must be creation--a change from
beauty to beauty.
-- John Muir --
from John Muir: In His Own Words
R.T.,
ReplyDeleteOut of the death of stars comes life.
as a (ahem)geologist, i greatly admire Muir's descriptions... although not technical, they are illuminating, presenting the global rock cycle in a nutshell... (erosion, deposition. burial heat/subduction, uplift, erosion...)
ReplyDeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteYes, he's an excellent writer and obviously knows something about the subject.
I love the idea of mountains as manuscripts.
ReplyDeleteBrian,
DeleteYes, it's like reading as geology history book for those who know the language.
basic geology is pretty approachable and readily understandable; it's when you get into geophysics and geochemistry that it gets hairy...
DeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteI just watched a Teaching Company lecture set titled--How the Earth Works. His major point was how much the study of geology had changed, and it was all part of one major system involving biochemistry, geophysics, geobiology and geochemistry and that one had to take into account the water and the atmosphere for a complete picture.
true; even when i was in school, it was changing a lot; after all it was only in the late fifties that continental drift was recongnized as plate tectonics, which has now burgeoned into one of the major geological areas of study... subduction and all that... very basically, the continents are surface features of plates that move around on the asthenosphere, driven by convection currents deep below the mantle... see Gondwanaland...
DeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteThe instructor seemed to suggest that plate tectonics was now the driving force behind most geological change on Earth.
that's true to some extent, but there are other factors: pole reversal, vulcanism, atmospheric composition(which has altered several times), meteoric collisions(approximately six at last count, with accompanying extinction events)...
DeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteHis point was that plate tectonics was NOW the most important. PT was the driving force behind vulcanism, earthquakes, etc.--everyday ongoing changes that is.