★★★★☆ | Science | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A highly readable account (as always) from John McPhee of a difficult subject. In this case, Geology. I read this to acquaint myself with the unusual mountain and desert terrain that we’ve encountered here in Arizona. I have learned a lot about geology in general from this short book. It’s also given me a whole new perspective on Time and the universe. A million years is nothing in geology, but uncomprehending to the human mind.
Highlights
Deffeyes is a big man with a tenured waistline. His hair flies behind him like Ludwig van Beethoven’s. He lectures in sneakers. His voice is syllabic, elocutionary, operatic. He has been described by a colleague as “an intellectual roving shortstop, with more ideas per square metre than anyone else in the department-they just tumble out.”
The inclination of a slope on which boulders would stay put was the angle of repose.
On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information.
Since the late Miocene, the earth’s magnetic field had reversed itself twenty times—from north to south, from south back to north—and the dates of those reversals had by now become well established.