09 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 The Seismograph is like the Spectroscope in Importance

Just as the spectroscope opened up a new astronomy by enabling the astronomer to determine some of the constituents of which distant stars are composed, so the seismograph, recording the unfelt motion of distant earthquakes, enables us to see into the earth and determine its nature with as great a certainty, up to a certain point, as if we could drive a tunnel through it and take samples of the matter passed through.
Folksonomies: instruments
Folksonomies: instruments
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Allowing us to see into the Earth.

16 MAY 2012 by ideonexus

 The State of Mind of Man in Olden Days

We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks. Looking upwards, he beheld ... the incorruptible firmament, wherein the star...
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Where he could detect the fires of hell beneath his feet and see the splendor of heaven in the night sky above.

21 MAR 2012 by ideonexus

 The Earth as an "Old Warrior"

Our earth is very old, an old warrior that has lived through many battles. Nevertheless, the face of it is still changing, and science sees no certain limit of time for its stately evolution. Our solid earth, apparently so stable, inert, and finished, is changing, mobile, and still evolving. Its major quakings are largely the echoes of that divine far-off event, the building of our noble mountains. The lava floods and intriguing volcanoes tell us of the plasticity, mobility, of the deep inter...
Folksonomies: metaphor earth science
Folksonomies: metaphor earth science
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It's many features the weathering on it's face and its scars.

21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus

 The Laetoli Footprints

team of paleoanthropologists led by Mary Leakey confirmed the bipedality of A. afarensis with another remarkable find in Tanzania: the famous “Laetoli footprints.” In 1976, Andrew Hill and another member of the team were taking a break by indulging in a favorite field pastime: pelting each other with chunks of dried elephant dung. Looking for ammunition in a dry stream bed, Hill stumbled upon a line of fossilized footprints. After careful excavation, the footprints turned out to be an ...
Folksonomies: evolution stories
Folksonomies: evolution stories
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Not only do these prints demonstrate A. afarensis could walk upright, but the nature of their preservation, having been made in volcanic ash and their proximity to one another, paints a image of two ancestors huddling together in an ashen landscape.