He Liked To Go From

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.

A Quarter-horse Jockey Learns To Think Of A Twenty-second Race As If It Were Occurring Across Twenty Minutes--in Distinct Parts, Spaced In His Consciousness. Each Nuance Of The Ride Comes To Him As He Builds His Race. If You Can Do The Opposite With Deep Time, Living In It And Thinking In It Until The Large Numbers Settle Into Place, You Can Sense How Swiftly The Initial Earth Packed Itself Together, How Swiftly Continents Have Assembled And Come Apart, How Far And Rapidly Continents Travel, How Quickly Mountains Rise And How Quickly They Disintegrate And Disappear.

When The Climbers In 1953 Planted Their Flags On The Highest Mountain, They Set Them In Snow Over The Skeletons Of Creatures That Had Lived In The Warm Clear Ocean That India, Moving North, Blanked Out. Possibly As Much As Twenty Thousand Feet Below The Seafloor, The Skeletal Remains Had Turned Into Rock. This One Fact Is A Treatise In Itself On The Movements Of The Surface Of The Earth. If By Some Fiat I Had To Restrict All This Writing To One Sentence, This Is The One I Would Choose: The Summit Of Mt. Everest Is Marine Limestone.

Almost All Americans Would Recognize Anchorage, Because Anchorage Is That Part Of Any City Where The City Has Burst Its Seams And Extruded Colonel Sanders.

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.