#geology

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#outdoors #science #nature

To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret. ↗

— James Hutton

#beauty

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales...from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster... ↗

— Penelope Lively

#cathedrals #geology #architecture

I don’t drink water, because if water can erode rock, think what it can do to flesh.
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— Jarod Kintz

#drinking #erode #erosion #flesh #geology

There is no thrill like the thrill of discovery; no life like the life of a mining camp in the days of its youth. Nevada had known them in full and overflowing measure. The salt of the sea in the blood of a sailor is but a weak and insipid condiment compared with the solution of cyanide, sage and silicate in the blood of the prospector. ↗

— C.B. Glasscock

#life

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

#geologist #geologists #geology #science #scientists