"Earth's crust" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... granite will be better appreciated when one understands how it enters landscape. The principal one of many igneous rocks, it is liquefied under intense heat and afterward cooled under pressure. Much of the earth's crust was once underlaid by granites in a more or less fluid state. When terrific internal pressures caused the earth's crust to fold and make mountains, this liquefied granite invaded the folds and pushed close up under the highest elevations. There it cooled. ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... "Those other tremors Wes mentioned follow a natural circum-Pacific belt which is well known to seismologists. I'm no expert, but perhaps they could have set off chain reactions below the earth's crust which triggered the two quakes in this ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... may modify the view above expressed. Since hydrogen is theoretically incapable of being permanently retained in the free state by the earth, its presence in the atmosphere indicates either that there is an influx from space or that it emanates from the earth's crust. In a similar way it may be assumed that atmospheric gases can be given off from the crust of the moon, thus, to a greater or less extent, supplying the place of the ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... this prime source of belief. Why not? Here is a great natural product, human belief; we treat it precisely as we do other natural products; we judge, that, like these, it has its law and justification. We assume that it is to be studied as Lyell studies the earth's crust, or Agassiz its life, or Mueller its languages. As our author shuns metaphysical, so do we shun metapsychical inquiries. We do not presume to go behind universal fact, and inquire whether it has any business to be fact; we simply endeavor to see it in its largest and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are momentary. One fierce, levelling shock and usually all is over. The torment within the earth has passed on and the awakened forces of the earth's crust sink into rest again, after having shaken the surface for many leagues. Rarely does the dread agent of ruin leave behind it such a terrible follower to complete its work as was the case in the doomed city of San Francisco. All seemed to lead towards such a carnival of ruin as the earth has ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... cover. Dr. Quain, whose learning exceeded even theirs—so the elders sarcastically ventured to surmise—was not ashamed to believe in the inspiration of the Old Testament; he could reconcile the chronology of the earth's crust with the first chapter of Genesis; he had a satisfactory explanation of the Johannine gospel; and his mere existence was an impregnable fortress from which the adherents of the banner of belief could not be dislodged. On this Sunday morning he offered a simple evangelical discourse, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... the Amazon, and its portentous tributaries flowing from south to north, were also formed perhaps at that time, great fissures caused by the sudden splitting and cooling of the earth's crust becoming the river beds. So perhaps was formed the giant canon of Colorado and the immense fissures in the earth's crust that occur in Central Asia, in Central Africa, and, as we shall see, on the central ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... published in 1693, he laid the foundation of the science of Geology. From his observations, as Superintendent of the Hartz Mines, and those which he made in his subsequent travels through Austria and Italy,—from an examination of the layers, in different localities, of the earth's crust, he deduced the first theory, in the geological sense, which has ever been propounded, of the earth's formation. Orthodox Lutheran as he was, he braved the theological prejudices which then, even more than now, affronted scientific inquiry in that direction. "First among men," says ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... its axis in 24 hours, which is the length of the day. If the earth were thus spinning in the atmosphere, the latter not being in motion, the wind would blow with ten times hurricane velocity. The friction would be so great that nothing but the foundation rocks of the earth's crust could withstand it, and the velocity of rotation would be reduced appreciably in a relatively short time. The air moves along with the earth as a part of it, and consequently no such frictional destruction takes place, but the earth rotates in the ether with that same rate, ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... it never so barren and desolate. To us, who for nearly a year had been staring our eyes out in a dazzling white infinity of snow and ice, it was indeed an experience to see once more a bit of the earth's crust. That this fragment was as poor and bare as it could be was not taken into consideration at ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... then, to which our reference is made is aluminum, the most abundant metal in the earth's crust. Of all substances, oxygen is the most abundant, constituting about one-half; after oxygen comes silicon, constituting about one-fourth, with aluminum third in all the list of substances of the composition. Leaving ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... twelve earthquake shocks have been experienced in this portion of Switzerland, and they have had no sensible influence on these sensitive instruments. In fact, a little consideration in relation to the character of such shocks renders it highly improbable that such brief tremors of the earth's crust could have been any agency in the generation of rhythmical oscillations of the whole mass of water in the lake. Indeed, it is very questionable whether any earthquake waves are ever produced in the ocean, except when the sea-bottom undergoes a ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the earth's crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... valleys may be the result of the action of water and ice in enlarging these original chasms. Little wonder that the earlier geologists, such as Whitney, were led to attribute the exceptional character of these valleys to exceptional and extraordinary agents—to sudden faulting or dislocation of the earth's crust. But geologists are becoming more and more loath to call in the cataclysmal to explain any feature of the topography of the land. Not to the thunder or the lightning, to earthquake or volcano, to the forces of upheaval or dislocation, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... of the subject, it will be evident how important an adjunct Natural History is to Geology; not only in interpreting the fragments of extinct animals found in the earth's crust, but in determining past changes in the surface which have left no geological record. It is certainly a wonderful and unexpected fact that an accurate knowledge of the distribution of birds and insects should enable us to map out lands and continents which disappeared beneath the ocean ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace |
